Tom Stoneham

Random musings about data ethics, digital rights, AI, and the digital divide. I am an academic philosopher interested in many things. Having spent most of my career on philosophy of mind, metaphysics and those topics in the early modern period, I now feel the urgency of good political philosophy and applied ethics. I will post links to new entries on Mastodon, though feel free to subscribe or use RSS. If you need to ask, CC-BY-NC-ND. (Why 24601? That is a reference to _Les Miserables_, the story of a failed revolution in which the people did not rise, the intellectuals were massacred, and the state-sponsored cruelty, poverty, and exploitation continued. Not this time!) Contact details etc.:

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On so-called "Trolley Problems"

December 6, 2024•879 words

Trolley Problems are a class of thought-experiments in which someone is placed in a situation where they have to make a decision - usually under time pressure but not always - where the only two options involve people dying. In one case five people die, in the other 'only' one person. The question is posed: What ought one (anyone? or just you?) do? These cases have captured the imagination of amateur philosophers and generated a small library worth of discussion. However, most of that discussio...

Consent to be governed

November 22, 2024•3,341 words

We have long ago reached the point where no human has the realistic option not to live subject to the power of some state or other. Every square centimetre of land is claimed as territory by some nation. There remains the sea, or at least the areas of the sea designated 'international waters', but a life continuously at sea is hardly a realistic option for more than a handful of the 8 billion people populating the world. Of course, it is possible to withdraw to remote places, go 'off gird' etc....

Whatever happened to the Online Safety Bill vs WhatsApp controversy?

November 21, 2024•843 words

The few people likely to read this blog will probably remember the big debates about whether the Online Safety Bill (or Act as it is now) would break end-to-end encryption (e2ee). This debate hit the floor of the House of Commons on 5 December 2022 in the debate on Amendment 153, specifically designed to remove the requirement of regulated services to have ‘the ability to monitor encrypted communications’. The Amendment was rejected. A few months later, the debate it the press through the not ...

Artificial what? Intelligence as reason-giving vs problem-solving

November 19, 2024•1,142 words

Philosophy isn't big on consensus, but there is widespread agreement, implicit rather than articulated, on one claim: Problem-solving ability is not the same as intelligence The standard definition of intelligence in AI and cognitive psychology which derives from Allan Newell and Herbert Simon, and was popularised by Steven Pinker in his influential 1997 book How the Mind Works, which is that ‘intelligence is the ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles’ (62). This is simply false. ...

Privacy, Access, and Metadata

November 17, 2024•1,128 words

I had a very strange feeling when reading 'In Defence of Surveillance Capitalism' by Peter Königs. It was systematic, organised, calm, rich with sources, but somehow the argument doesn't add up. Then I realised: this is an academic sealion. Anyway, I am not going to go through all of it but I was struck by this very hasty argument for an access account of privacy and its application to surveillance capitalism, which is worth a rebuttal: Macnish (2018) offers a powerful thought experiment in s...

'Merely a means to an end'

November 14, 2024•1,088 words

Philosophers who are impressed by Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy often struggle with his view of animals, neatly but unfortunately expressed in this passage: The fact that the human being can have the representation “I” raises him infinitely above all the other beings on earth. By this he is a person….that is, a being altogether different in rank and dignity from things, such as irrational animals, with which one may deal and dispose at one’s discretion. (Kant [1798] 2010: 239) The typical...

Why are you even using genAI?

November 14, 2024•743 words

A friend pointed me in the direction of this article as yet another example of AI bias in action: https://community.thefemalelead.com/p/all-i-wanted-was-an-ai-image-of-a It is really important that awareness is raised of the weaknesses of genAI and especially the way it will always perpetuate bias and structural injustice in society. After all, it is just a ‘next token generator’ and if the previous tokens had a pattern, however unfortunate that was, it will continue the pattern. But I also h...

AI Futures: China or the West?

November 8, 2024•590 words

One question I was asked on my recent trip to China was: We are on the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution. The first three were powered by technologies developed in Britain and America. Will that be true of the fourth or will Chinese technology be the driving force? Setting aside what this tells us about the current political narrative around technology in China, it is an interesting question in itself which is worth reflecting on. So I am going to write up in a little more detail the ...

Bread and circuses

October 27, 2024•386 words

I am back in China for the first time since 2019. The changes are incremental but the surveillance state is complete. The general acceptance of Live Facial Recognition is so extensive that you can walk up to a screen at the airport and it will recognise you and display you flight details and gate number (large enough for everyone else to see too). Even going through the turnstiles to enter a public toilet there was a screen showing your face being captured. The Great Firewall is more effective...

Notes and Summaries

October 10, 2024•1,102 words

AI summaries With so much being invested in increasing our use of genAI, it is now almost impossible to read any digital text without being offered an AI-generated summary of key points. Since most of what I read has abstracts or executive summaries, this is of little use to me personally, but it does bear some examination. What is the cognitive function of such summaries? They are sold as 'time saving', but is that really what they are doing? An abstract or executive summary allows me to de...

Coding, trust and genAI

September 23, 2024•1,046 words

I learned to code in the 1980s for a Computer Science A-level. We used command line BASIC: my A-level project was to plot and integrate a quadratic function. It took months to write. Since then I have done no coding except hacking about a few scripts and some HTML, so when opportunity arose, I took a crash course in Python. Setting aside the wow-factor of Jupyter notebooks, two things struck me: No GOTO function!! Code libraries The more I think about the use of code libraries in modern cod...

We are better than this

July 23, 2024•1,407 words

Drawing on Morozov's famous 2013 definition of tech-solutionism, we can define an equally invidious and problematic way of thinking about the challenges AI presents to humanity: Regulo-solutionism is taking complex social phenomena to be: “neatly defined problems with definite, regulatory solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized—if only the right policies are in place!” Sometimes I think regulo-solutionism is connected to nostalgia for the confide...

How to stop thinking like a Regulosolutionist

June 25, 2024•1,161 words

Given my view that regulation of Big Tech is always too late, too local, and too hard to enforce so we need to supplement it with a different approach of consumer (or 'digital citizen') education and organisation parallel to the workers movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I felt obliged to read up on the opposing view, epitomised by Jamie Susskind's The Digital Republic. I found myself surprisingly tolerant of his attempts to engage with political philosophy - we can't all be e...

44 million teachers?

June 25, 2024•882 words

At a conference the other week there was a presentation by the Otermans Institute, who have this slogan: Democratising Learning through AI Technology They are building AI agents which can act as personal tutors. The idea is that these can be rolled out in places where there is a shortage of teachers, of which the presenter told us, there was currently a global shortage of 44 million. We will come back to the question of whether this counts as 'democratising' - at first blush that seems a ra...

Privacy and old data

May 27, 2024•934 words

Neil Brown of neilzone fame posed an ethical question on Mastodon. In brief: I have bought a 30 year old computer and the hard disk hasn't been wiped. Ethically, should I wipe it immediately or may I poke around a bit first? A few points of context. First, the focus on the ethical is important: Neil is a lawyer and wants to set aside legal/regulatory considerations and focus on the ethical. And I take him to really mean the ethical and not the quasi-regulatory concept which goes by the same ...

Minds and theories of mind

May 22, 2024•925 words

Back when I was a nipper of a grad student, one of my supervisors and another grad student edited a journal special edition of 'state of the art' papers called Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate. While this wasn't directly relevant to my own research (on self-knowledge) it was close enough for me to follow the debate. So when this headline popped up on Monday, I was fascinated: AI Outperforms Humans in Theory of Mind Tests: Large language models convincingly mimic the understanding o...

Calls for AI regulation vs being an adult

April 19, 2024•974 words

One of the questions I was asked after a talk to a multi-disciplinary audience yesterday was: There was a movement where a party petition to stop or slowdown development of AI temporarily. Can you give us your thought on their position? This refers to the Future of Life Institute open letter in March 2023 calling for a six month pause in 'training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4'. For now I will set aside the question of whether the open letter's focus on existential threats and look...

The problem of second-order bias

April 3, 2024•604 words

We are all now familiar with problems of bias in various algorithms (now called AIs) and also that what these algorithms are doing is picking up, reflecting, and sometimes amplifying bias in the data, which often reflect biases in society. Might there also not be a similar problem of bias in how we - as a society - think about the uses of AI reflecting existing biases about different types of human knowledge and understanding? There is a dominant narrative that the AI revolution is inevitable...

The fundamental question of ethics

March 30, 2024•168 words

For millennia philosophers have taken the fundamental ethical question to be: How ought I to live? (Which becomes in a specific situation: What ought I to do?) This question is framed in a way which presupposes that the choices we make determine the life we live, and those lives can be evaluated in terms of happiness/wellbeing/eudaimonia. Thus the fundamental evaluative framework, which undergirds all ethical norms and prescriptions, is one of positive outcomes. There is a conception of an atta...

Big Tech States and Anarchist Neutrality

March 28, 2024•1,081 words

Last week I gave a seminar on taking literally the idea that some Big Tech companies can be considered non-territorial states, drawing on ideas I blogged back in November. One key feature of these companies is that they are supra-jurisdictional: they can choose which jurisdiction to be registered in for the various different purposes of registration. One of those purposes is public trading of stocks and my talk followed hot on the heels of Telegram announcing that they were considering an IPO o...

Is there really an analogy between genAI and the spreadsheet?

March 15, 2024•530 words

The ever-interesting Tim Harford has written a blog post about learning from past game-changing technologies: What the birth of the spreadsheet teaches us about generative AI. Neither he nor I are specialists in the sociology of science and technology, so this feels a bit like two bald men arguing over a comb, but I do think he has missed some really important disanalogies, and by doing so, bought into #AIHype. He concludes: When a tool is ubiquitous, and convenient, we kludge our way through...

Toy, tool or team member? genAI in a university context

February 26, 2024•197 words

Another abstract. This one for a conference at the University of Zurich on How will AI impact Doctoral Education?. Toy, tool or team member? genAI in a university context: genAI is being rolled out into our lives very quickly by the companies who have invested vast sums in these technologies. Many businesses have bought or developed bespoke systems which generate marginal productivity gains, which are cost-saving at scale. Universities are struggling to catch up, lacking the capital to invest ...

Transcending AI

February 22, 2024•789 words

Discussion of genAI in my circles, which are largely academia, tends to fall into three camps: Deflating #AIHype Considering ethical and regulatory guardrails Finding positive uses Now, I find 3 very puzzling. It is a new technology, it may be useful, it may not be. Why put all this effort into trying to find good uses? Academia has taken on board and found many good uses, over the years, of other new technologies, including email, the web and social media. In those cases the good uses were...

Autonomy, Safety, and Regulo-solutionism

February 11, 2024•294 words

This is an abstract for a talk in July at the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) conference in Amsterdam. Any suggestions or comments which will help develop the full paper much appreciated! When Stanislav Petrov disobeyed orders on 26 September 1983 he probably saved the human race from mass extinction. For any orders, rules or regulations, there may be such a moment when it is better to disobey than to obey. ...

Search and Distortion

December 12, 2023•1,538 words

My brilliant colleague Hannah Carnegy-Arbuthnott has written a really interesting paper on 'Privacy, Publicity, and the Right to be Forgotten'. She argues that as well as claims for privacy and against defamation, we also have legitimate moral claims against distortion, where distortion is: the presentation of true information about someone 'in a way that suggests it would be appropriate to hold them accountable for it, when it is no longer appropriate to do so' (2). Hannah uses this to gi...

LLMs, better writing, and cognitive diversity

November 25, 2023•546 words

I have previously commented that it is easy to detect a student using an LLM to generate text in an essay because LLMs write better English: grammatical, with sophisticated syntax and clear stucture. Elon Musk said something similar in his interview with Rishi Sunak. We need to challenge this idea, not because it is false but because it reveals we accept a norm of 'better writing' which perhaps we should reject. One way of seeing this is to note that the literary style of LLMs is that of neurot...

LLMs in teaching? Why?

November 21, 2023•1,045 words

The current issue of Nature has a 'Feature', i.e. not a peer reviewed article, called 'ChatGPT enters the classroom'.1 While the feature is well-researched journalism and contains a great deal of interest, it is uncritical at key points. I want to look carefully at this paragraph (p.475): Using LLMs to read and summarize large stretches of text could save students and teachers time and help them to instead focus on discussion and learning. ChatGPT’s ability to lucidly discuss nearly any topic ...

Countries and Companies Part 1

November 9, 2023•1,774 words

At the AI Fringe last week, Peter Kyle MP noted that SpaceX had sent more into space, by weight, last year than 'any other country'. It was a slip of the tongue, but a revealing one. The day before Gina Neff had asked whether Big Tech companies were 'quasi-states'. How different would the AI Summit - and the Sunak-Musk love-in - have been of we took this thought seriously? In this post I examine the plausibility of the claim. In Part 2 I look at the consequences. What is a state? I have alway...

Notes on netiquette for teamwork

October 23, 2023•435 words

I am teaching a problem-based learning course at the moment which involves the students working as a multi-disciplinary team to address a specific task. My role in the role play scenario is as a critical friend. As well as being multi-disciplinary, the students have very different prior experience, so helping them create an effective team dynamic has been really interesting. As critical friend, I am on all their group chats, but I don't intervene directly At the end of last week, some tensions...

Employers, personal contact data, and informed consent

September 29, 2023•1,626 words

Under what circumstances might an employer need to know your personal mobile phone number? In full recognition that there is a wide range of very different cases out there, from employers who provide not only IT systems but also mobile phones to those who rely entirely on personal devices and commercial (but usually free) platforms, I want to focus on the increasingly common case where the employer provides email (and maybe some other systems) but not mobile phones. I am also going to make ano...