From coder to creator : responsibility issues in intelligent artifact design

Creation of autonomously acting, learning artifacts has reached a point where humans cannot any more be justly held responsible for the actions of certain types of machines. Such machines learn during operation, thus continuously changing their original behaviour in uncontrollable (by the initial manufacturer) ways. They act without effective supervision and have an epistemic advantage over humans, in that their extended sensory apparatus, their superior processing speed and perfect memory render it impossible for humans to supervise the machine\u27s decisions in real-time. We survey the techniques of artificial intelligence engineering, showing that there has been a shift in the role of the programmer of such machines from a coder (who has complete control over the program in the machine) to a mere creator of software organisms which evolve and develop by themselves. We then discuss the problem of responsibility ascription to such machines, trying to avoid the metaphysical pitfalls of the mind-body problem. We propose five criteria for purely legal responsibility, which are in accordance both with the findings of contemporary analytic philosophy and with legal practise. We suggest that Stahl\u27s (2006) concept of quasi-responsibility might also be a way to handle the responsibility gap

The Role of Passive Evil in Perpetuating Downward Academic Mobbing

Downward academic mobbing occurs when unethical administrators initiate a pattern of bullying, intimidation, and the commission of personal and career damage on undeserving faculty members (most often principled, tenured professors who question their decisions or call attention to unethical behavior such as policy violations and lack of academic due process). Once these unethical administrators succeed in framing a faculty victim as a target (often through innuendo, factual distortions, or outright lies), the victim\u27s colleagues—many of whom have known and benefited from the victim for years—either fail to support the victim (a problem known as passive evil) or begin actively participating in the persecution themselves (often in pursuit of personal gain). The purpose of this chapter is to focus on the first instance (i.e., passive evil), and to discuss how passive evildoers\u27 failure to stand up for victims of downward academic mobbing effectively encourages future acts of persecution—including against the passive evildoers themselves