Trust, Trustworthiness, and the Moral Consequence of Consistency

Situationists such as John Doris, Gilbert Harman, and Maria Merritt suppose that appeal to reliable behavioral dispositions can be dispensed with without radical revision to morality as we know it. This paper challenges this supposition, arguing that abandoning hope in reliable dispositions rules out genuine trust and forces us to suspend core reactive attitudes of gratitude and resentment, esteem and indignation. By examining situationism through the lens of trust we learn something about situationism (in particular, the radically revisionary moral implications of its adoption) as well as something about trust (in particular, that the conditions necessary for genuine trust include a belief in a capacity for robust dispositions)

Empathy and the Right to Be an Exception: What LLMs Can and Cannot Do

Advances in the performance of large language models (LLMs) have led some researchers to propose the emergence of theory of mind (ToM) in artificial intelligence (AI). LLMs can attribute beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions, and they will improve in their accuracy. Rather than employing the characteristically human method of empathy, they learn to attribute mental states by recognizing linguistic patterns in a dataset that typically do not include that individual. We ask whether LLMs' inability to empathize precludes them from honoring an individual's right to be an exception, that is, from making assessments of character and predictions of behavior that reflect appropriate sensitivity to a person's individuality. Can LLMs seriously consider an individual's claim that their case is different based on internal mental states like beliefs, desires, and intentions, or are they limited to judging that case based on its similarities to others? We propose that the method of empathy has special significance for honoring the right to be an exception that is distinct from the value of predictive accuracy, at which LLMs excel. We conclude by considering whether using empathy to consider exceptional cases has intrinsic or merely practical value and we introduce conceptual and empirical avenues for advancing this investigation

Humble Machines: Attending to the Underappreciated Costs of Misplaced Distrust

It is curious that AI increasingly outperforms human decision makers, yet much of the public distrusts AI to make decisions affecting their lives. In this paper we explore a novel theory that may explain one reason for this. We propose that public distrust of AI is a moral consequence of designing systems that prioritize reduction of costs of false positives over less tangible costs of false negatives. We show that such systems, which we characterize as 'distrustful', are more likely to miscategorize trustworthy individuals, with cascading consequences to both those individuals and the overall human-AI trust relationship. Ultimately, we argue that public distrust of AI stems from well-founded concern about the potential of being miscategorized. We propose that restoring public trust in AI will require that systems are designed to embody a stance of 'humble trust', whereby the moral costs of the misplaced distrust associated with false negatives is weighted appropriately during development and use

Preserving the Autographic/Allographic Distinction

In his study of forms of representation, Nel- son Goodman sought to explain why some representations, like words or musical scores, are considered replicable while others, such as paintings, are not. He named the replicable rep- resentations allographic and the ones we consider nonreplicable autographic (Goodman 1976, 113). His explanation of what grounds this distinction is in his theory of notations (chaps. IV–V). That theory essentially seeks to secure the possibility of identity for representations, as well as the possibility of knowing such identity, by setting out a number of requirements. Unless a repre- sentational practice satisfies the requirements (is “amenable to notation” [121]), the token repre- sentations it produces cannot count as identical to one another or else cannot be known to be identi- cal. That is why we consider such representations nonreplicable, that is, autographic. According to Goodman, written words satisfy some of the requirements for notations (Good- man 1976, 140), with the result that word tokens can be grouped into types whose members are equivalent and interchangeable. Pictures satisfy no notational requirements: “The sketch . . . is not in a language or notation at all, but in a system without either syntactic or semantic differentia- tion” (192). This means that token pictures can- not be classified into groupings whose members are type-identical and interchangeable. In other words, no picture can count as a replica of another picture, and pictures are autographic. In 2012, I published an analysis of digital pic- tures in this journal that cast doubt on Goodman’s distinction between allographic and autographic representations (Zeimbekis 2012). I argued that (i) digital pictures are replicable representations and therefore allographic, (ii) digital pictures are not notational representations, and (iii) there is no obstacle in principle to conceiving of all pictures as replicable (allographic) representations. In a recent article, Jason D’Cruz and P. D. Mag- nus reject points (ii) and (iii) (2014, Section iii). Concerning (i), they agree that digital pictures are allographic, but they argue that they are al- lographic because they are notational, whereas I argue that digital pictures are allographic despite not being notational. To defend these positions, D’Cruz and Magnus have to rebut my own views. However, when it comes to doing this, they mis- understand key parts of my proposal and fail to grasp the proposal’s structure. As a result, they succeed neither in rebutting points (ii) and (iii) nor in justifying point (i)

Journeys from quantum optics to quantum technology

Sir Peter Knight is a pioneer in quantum optics which has now grown to an important branch of modern physics to study the foundations and applications of quantum physics. He is leading an effort to develop new technologies from quantum mechanics. In this collection of essays, we recall the time we were working with him as a postdoc or a PhD student and look at how the time with him has influenced our research

Displacement and gratitude: accounting for the political obligation of refugees

On what basis, and to what extent, are refugees obligated to obey the laws of their host countries? Consideration of the specific case of asylum-seekers generates, I think, two competing intuitions: (1) the refugee has a prima facie obligation to obey the laws of her host country and (2) none of the popularly canvassed substrates of political obligation—consent, tacit consent, fairness, or social role—is at all apt to explain the presence of this obligation. I contend that the unfashionable gratitude account of political obligation does the best job of accounting for the intuitions. As has been noticed by other commentators, obligations of gratitude are difficult to specify and subject to numerous cancelling conditions. I analyze these conditions in detail and conclude that if one accepts that gratitude is the basis of the political obligation of the refugee, then one must face up to just how frangible the obligation is. In particular, the obligation is conditional on the fair and generous treatment of refugees that is consistent with their dignity as human beings