Artificial intelligence, transparency, and public decision-making: Why explanations are key when trying to produce perceived legitimacy

The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for making decisions in public affairs has sparked a lively debate on the benefits and potential harms of self-learning technologies, ranging from the hopes of fully informed and objectively taken decisions to fear for the destruction of mankind. To prevent the negative outcomes and to achieve accountable systems, many have argued that we need to open up the “black box” of AI decision-making and make it more transparent. Whereas this debate has primarily focused on how transparency can secure high-quality, fair, and reliable decisions, far less attention has been devoted to the role of transparency when it comes to how the general public come to perceive AI decision-making as legitimate and worthy of acceptance. Since relying on coercion is not only normatively problematic but also costly and highly inefficient, perceived legitimacy is fundamental to the democratic system. This paper discusses how transparency in and about AI decision-making can affect the public’s perception of the legitimacy of decisions and decision-makers and produce a framework for analyzing these questions. We argue that a limited form of transparency that focuses on providing justifications for decisions has the potential to provide sufficient ground for perceived legitimacy without producing the harms full transparency would bring

"Hostile architecture" and its confederates: A conceptual framework for how we should perceive our cities and the objects in them

In recent years “hostile architecture” or designs (also called “disciplinary architecture” and “defensive architecture”) has become an ever more common feature of our cities. Examples of these designs are benches you cannot sleep on, spikes you cannot stand on, and metal plugs you cannot skate on. These designs have created an outrage among activists and the general population since they have largely been conceived as an attack on the worst-off and there is an increasing academic body of work mostly looking into their design features, the motivations behind them, but also whether and under what condition they should be used. Although progress has been made on the issue of these forms of architecture/designs, no clear definitions currently exist for “hostile architecture,” (etc.) and their related concepts, which are especially concerned with their respective environments, such as a “hostile environment.” As a result, there has been no clear discussion of how these concepts relate to each other and also to morally permissible and impermissible actions, which many times lead the discussion astray. In this paper I try to amend this by defining the central concepts, as well as showing how they relate to each other and morally permissible and impermissible actions.Ces dernières années, les « architectures hostiles » ou conceptions (également appelées « architecture disciplinaire » et « architecture défensive ») sont devenues de plus en plus courantes dans nos villes. Des bancs sur lesquels vous ne pouvez pas dormir, des pointes sur lesquelles vous ne pouvez pas vous tenir debout et des chevilles métalliques sur lesquelles vous ne pouvez pas « skater » sont des exemples de ces conceptions. Ces conceptions ont créé un scandale parmi les activistes et la population en général, car elles ont été en grande partie conçues comme une attaque contre les plus démunis. De plus en plus de travaux universitaires examinent principalement leurs caractéristiques conceptuelles, leurs motivations, mais aussi si et dans quelles conditions ils devraient être utilisés.Bien que des progrès aient été accomplis sur la question de ces formes d’architecture / de conception, il n’existe actuellement aucune définition claire de « architecture hostile » (etc.) et des concepts associés, qui concernent particulièrement leurs environnements respectifs, tels que « architecture hostile ». En conséquence, il n’y a pas eu de discussion claire sur la manière dont ces concepts s’apparentaient les uns aux autres, ni aussi à des actions moralement admissibles et inadmissibles, qui souvent égarent la discussion. Dans cet article, j’essaie de modifier cela en définissant les concepts centraux et en montrant comment ils se rapportent les uns aux autres et aux actions moralement admissibles et non autorisées

Transformations of High-Level Synthesis Codes for High-Performance Computing

Specialized hardware architectures promise a major step in performance and energy efficiency over the traditional load/store devices currently employed in large scale computing systems. The adoption of high-level synthesis (HLS) from languages such as C/C++ and OpenCL has greatly increased programmer productivity when designing for such platforms. While this has enabled a wider audience to target specialized hardware, the optimization principles known from traditional software design are no longer sufficient to implement high-performance codes. Fast and efficient codes for reconfigurable platforms are thus still challenging to design. To alleviate this, we present a set of optimizing transformations for HLS, targeting scalable and efficient architectures for high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Our work provides a toolbox for developers, where we systematically identify classes of transformations, the characteristics of their effect on the HLS code and the resulting hardware (e.g., increases data reuse or resource consumption), and the objectives that each transformation can target (e.g., resolve interface contention, or increase parallelism). We show how these can be used to efficiently exploit pipelining, on-chip distributed fast memory, and on-chip streaming dataflow, allowing for massively parallel architectures. To quantify the effect of our transformations, we use them to optimize a set of throughput-oriented FPGA kernels, demonstrating that our enhancements are sufficient to scale up parallelism within the hardware constraints. With the transformations covered, we hope to establish a common framework for performance engineers, compiler developers, and hardware developers, to tap into the performance potential offered by specialized hardware architectures using HLS

On Defining “Reliance” and “Trust”: Purposes, Conditions of Adequacy, and New Definitions

Trust is often perceived as having great value. For example, there is a strong belief that trust will bring different sorts of public goods and help us preserve common resources. A related concept which is just as important, but perhaps not explicitly discussed to the same extent as “trust”, is “reliance” or “confidence”. To be able to rely on some agent is often seen as a prerequisite for being able to trust this agent. Up to now, the conceptual discussion about the definition of trust and reliance has been rational in the sense that most people involved have offered arguments for their respective views, or against competing views. While these arguments rely on some criterion or other, these criteria are rarely explicitly stated, and to our knowledge, no systematic account of such criteria has been offered. In this paper we give an account of what criteria we should use to assess tentative definitions of “trust” and “reliance”. We will also offer our own well-founded definitions of “trust” and “reliance”. Trust should be regarded as a kind of reliance and we defend what we call “the accountability view” of trust, by appealing to the desiderata we identify in the first parts of the paper.Fulltext available here:\ua0https://rdcu.be/chqB

Ethics in Automotive Engineering

The need for reflecting engineers that can deal with ethical dilemmas are increasingly important. In the automotive field, the “diesel gate” in 2015[1] has put the ethical aspect in focus. However, this scandal can be explained by a consequence of (bad) political decisions and (insufficient) technological development. The dilemma for the students (and the society as well) is that these problems are complex and that there are no clear “right or wrong”. Nevertheless, no matter how difficult the problem, ethical dilemmas will need to be dealt with and the future engineers from Chalmers can contribute to a more (ethically) sustainable future.In the master’s program Automotive Engineering (MPAUT), the course in Internal Combustion Engines (MTF240) is used as the platform for practice in ethical reflections. With central support (from Karl Fine de Licht), the “applied ethics” approach is implemented using a bottom-up approach, working with a hypothetical but realistic ethical dilemma. The TLA consists of one lecture and one assignment. By applying a “generic model for critical thinking on ethical issues”, the students write a small assignment (two by two) within the course.The students perform reasonably well, and the correction of the PMs is not very rigorous. In the future, the assessment may need to be more stringent as well as the lecture and instruction also need to be continuously improved. The course evaluations are generally positive (however not excellent, average 4.0) and the students are not used to this kind of assignment. However, it’s very interesting and rewarding (as a teacher) to read the students reflections and even if their ethical reflection skills are not very advanced, the reflection exercise is hopefully a valuable experience in their future career. \ua0\ua0\ua0[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scanda

Variable interaction specificity and symbiont performance in Panamanian <i>Trachymyrmex</i> and <i>Sericomyrmex</i> fungus-growing ants

BACKGROUND: Cooperative benefits of mutualistic interactions are affected by genetic variation among the interacting partners, which may have consequences for interaction-specificities across guilds of sympatric species with similar mutualistic life histories. The gardens of fungus-growing (attine) ants produce carbohydrate active enzymes that degrade plant material collected by the ants and offer them food in exchange. The spectrum of these enzyme activities is an important symbiont service to the host but may vary among cultivar genotypes. The sympatric occurrence of several Trachymyrmex and Sericomyrmex higher attine ants in Gamboa, Panama provided the opportunity to do a quantitative study of species-level interaction-specificity. RESULTS: We genotyped the ants for Cytochrome Oxidase and their Leucoagaricus fungal cultivars for ITS rDNA. Combined with activity measurements for 12 carbohydrate active enzymes, these data allowed us to test whether garden enzyme activity was affected by fungal strain, farming ants or combinations of the two. We detected two cryptic ant species, raising ant species number from four to six, and we show that the 38 sampled colonies reared a total of seven fungal haplotypes that were different enough to represent separate Leucoagaricus species. The Sericomyrmex species and one of the Trachymyrmex species reared the same fungal cultivar in all sampled colonies, but the remaining four Trachymyrmex species largely shared the other cultivars. Fungal enzyme activity spectra were significantly affected by both cultivar species and farming ant species, and more so for certain ant-cultivar combinations than others. However, relative changes in activity of single enzymes only depended on cultivar genotype and not on the ant species farming a cultivar. CONCLUSIONS: Ant cultivar symbiont-specificity varied from almost full symbiont sharing to one-to-one specialization, suggesting that trade-offs between enzyme activity spectra and life-history traits such as desiccation tolerance, disease susceptibility and temperature sensitivity may apply in some combinations but not in others. We hypothesize that this may be related to ecological specialization in general, but this awaits further testing. Our finding of both cryptic ant species and extensive cultivar diversity underlines the importance of identifying all species-level variation before embarking on estimates of interaction specificity. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12862-014-0244-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users