Category: Ethics
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Large Language Models as Moral Experts?
The general consensus among most people has been that human values will forever be the domain of human beings, and not AI. This paper seems to suggest that moral judgement may not be off-limits to machines after all.
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My phone was made by slaves and I need to decide what I’m going to do about that
I’m going to need a new phone soon and I’ve been thinking about what the replacement will be. I typically buy the cheapest, decent phone I can find and replace the standard version of Android with an open source operating system. Over the last 5+ years that’s meant two consecutive Xiaomi handsets running LineageOS, and I’ve…
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Podcast – Being Good and Doing Good (Making Sense #44)
https://samharris.org/podcasts/being-good-and-doing-good/ In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Oxford philosopher William MacAskill about effective altruism, moral illusions, existential risk, and other topics. William MacAskill is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at Lincoln College, Oxford. He was educated at Cambridge, Princeton, and Oxford. He is one of the primary voices in…
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Comment: Microsoft has created a tool to find pedophiles in online chats
On the basis of words and patterns of speech, the system assigns a rating for the likelihood that one of the participants is trying to groom the other. Companies implementing the technique can set a score (for example, 8 out of 10) above which any flagged conversations are sent to a human moderator to review.…
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PSA: Peter Singer’s “The life you can save” is available for free
In 2009, Peter Singer wrote the first edition of The Life You Can Save to demonstrate why we should care about and help those living in global extreme poverty, and how easy it is to improve and even save lives by giving effectively. This morning I listened to an 80 000 hours podcast with Peter…
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Comment: Will robots have rights in the future?
If we get to create robots that are also capable of feeling pain then that will be somewhere else that we have to push the circle of moral concern backwards because I certainly think we would have to include them in our moral concern once we’ve actually created beings with capacities, desires, wants, enjoyments, miseries…
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Comment: Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes
The results underscore another growing problem in AI, too: the sheer intensity of resources now required to produce paper-worthy results has made it increasingly challenging for people working in academia to continue contributing to research. “This trend toward training huge models on tons of data is not feasible for academics…because we don’t have the computational…
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10 recommendations for the ethical use of AI
In February the New York Times hosted the New Work Summit, a conference that explored the opportunities and risks associated with the emergence of artificial intelligence across all aspects of society. Attendees worked in groups to compile a list of recommendations for building and deploying ethical artificial intelligence, the results of which are listed below.…
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Comment: Why AI is a threat to democracy—and what we can do to stop it
The developmental track of AI is a problem, and every one of us has a stake. You, me, my dad, my next-door neighbor, the guy at the Starbucks that I’m walking past right now. So what should everyday people do? Be more aware of who’s using your data and how. Take a few minutes to…
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Comment: Facebook says it’s going to make it harder to access anti-vax misinformation
Facebook won’t go as far as banning pages that spread anti-vaccine messages…[but] would make them harder to find. It will do this by reducing their ranking and not including them as recommendations or predictions in search. Firth. N. (2019). Facebook says it’s going to make it harder to access anti-vax misinformation. MIT Technology Review. Of…
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First compute no harm
Is it acceptable for algorithms today, or an AGI in a decade’s time, to suggest withdrawal of aggressive care and so hasten death? Or alternatively, should it recommend persistence with futile care? The notion of “doing no harm” is stretched further when an AI must choose between patient and societal benefit. We thus need to…
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My presentation for the Reimagine Education conference
Here is a summarised version of the presentation I’m giving later this morning at the Reimagine Education conference. You can download the slides here.
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How to ensure safety for medical artificial intelligence
When we think of AI, we are naturally drawn to its power to transform diagnosis and treatment planning and weigh up its potential by comparing AI capabilities to those of humans. We have yet, however, to look at AI seriously through the lens of patient safety. What new risks do these technologies bring to patients,…
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Another Terrible Idea from Turnitin | Just Visiting
Allowing the proliferation of algorithmic surveillance as a substitution for human engagement and judgment helps pave the road to an ugly future where students spend more time interacting algorithms than instructors or each other. This is not a sound way to help writers develop robust and flexible writing practices. Source: Another Terrible Idea from Turnitin…
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Critical digital pedagogy in the classroom: Practical implementation
Update (12-02-18): You can now download the full chapter here (A critical pedagogy for online learning in physiotherapy education) and the edited collection here. This post is inspired by the work I’ve recently done for a book chapter, as well as several articles on Hybrid Pedagogy but in particular, Adam Heidebrink-Bruno’s Syllabus as Manifesto. I’ve been wanting…
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IPE course project update
This post is cross-posted from the International Ethics Project site. My 4th year students have recently completed the first writing task in the IEP course pilot project. I thought I’d post a quick update on the process using screenshots to illustrate how the course is being run. We’re using a free version of WordPress which…
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Introducing the Humanities into physiotherapy education
This post has been modified and published on The Conversation: Africa as Physiotherapy students have much to learn from the humanities. I’m increasingly drawn to the idea of integrating some aspect of the Humanities into undergraduate physiotherapy education. We focus (almost) all of the curriculum on the basic sciences and then the clinical sciences, which has a certain…
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First draft of article on Informed Consent for the Clinical Teacher
Featured image “Diverging paths” by SDJ on Deviant Art. I’ve just finished the first draft of my 13th article in the Clinical Teacher mobile app. It’s been a LONG time since I’ve managed to put some effort into this project, mainly for personal reasons (my second daughter was born in March last year and we…
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Digital literacy survey: Outcome of reliability testing
Earlier this year we started the International Ethics Project, a collaboration between physiotherapy departments from several countries who intend offering an online course in professional ethics to their undergraduate students. You can read more about the project here. In June we started the process of developing a questionnaire that we can use to establish some…
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An international project in professional ethics
Earlier this year I began working with several colleagues on an international module in professional ethics. We’re going to spend 2015 collaboratively designing a module that students from a variety of undergraduate physiotherapy programmes can complete, in both online and face-to-face contexts. The project builds on the work I’ve done previously as part of my PhD research (these notes…