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...

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....

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 ...

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. ...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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. ...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

I sent the following to BBC TechLife - with a tl;dr audio version - but on the assumption they won't use it, I thought it worth posting here as well. "My name is Tom Stoneham and I am an academic working on Data Privacy, Digital Rights and Responsible AI. There has been a lot of discussion recently about regulation of AI and biometric surveillance like facial recognition. I do not want to stop that drive for regulation, but I think it is important to recognise that it is necessary but not suff...

Fingerprints Fingerprints, and handprints more generally, were first used by Sir William Herschel, an administrator in the Indian Civil Service, in the 1850s in order to provide a more robust form of identity verification. At first this was an addition to a signature on a contract because he thought signatures too deniable. Later he used them to identify pensioners collecting benefits and criminals serving punishments. The realisation that our passage through the world leaves traces of these d...

Like many people interested in data ethics, I feel a deep disquiet about data-scraping of public social media posts. I used to think that I could explain this by arguing for a presumed default copyright status drawn from the intentions of social media users. TL;DR this is probably CC-BY-NC-ND, with classes of exemptions to ND (e.g. if someone makes a joke they are generally happy for it to become a meme, but if they say something about themselves, ND holds) and BY (e.g. if researchers are look...

I don't know when educational institutions began taking 'registers' to record which students were attending class - and which not - but I suspect it is a very ancient practice. Why do they do it? Well, in many cases there is a requirement of attendance and consequent sanctions for non-attendance. In schools, this may be a requirement imposed by the state. Just today there was a UK news headline: 'Headteachers should pick up absent pupils from home, says education secretary'. There are clearly...

Like many universities, during this summer assessment season we have had a number of students using AI generated text in their essays in ways which constitute academic misconduct under our existing rules. In my discipline, and I believe in other humanities disciplines, these have been pretty easy to spot. Of course, it is possible that we missed at least as many as we caught, but when I think about why they were so easy to spot, I am inclined to think we are pretty reliable. There are some real...

Synchronous forms of communication - from speaking to someone in earshot (or signing in 'eyeshot') to telephone and video calls - have a power structure missing from asynchronous forms of communication. They restrict when the audience must (i) attend to the content of the communication and (ii) make any appropriate response. By engaging in a synchronous form of communication, the speaker is attempting to restrict the autonomy of the hearer, attempting to make them do something - to listen and re...

Suppose you are designing a private messaging app and your 'target market' wants the ability to recover their account, should they lose or upgrade their phone. The obvious ways of doing this (I would be interested if there were some unobvious ways!)1 all require the user to provide three things: An account identifier An authorisation token Some kind of decryption key (Depending what is kept on the servers and what level of recovery you want to give your users, 3 may not be needed.) Now, th...

There is a lot of discussion about superintelligent AI and existential threats to humanity at the moment, and calls for regulation. Now I don't want to suggest that there shouldn't be some form of precautionary regulation in this space, however hard it is to imagine an effective global policing of a technology which is harder to detect than nuclear weapon manufacture. Nor do I want to comment on why regulation may in fact be counter-productive, since it doesn't change the motivations of bad act...

Choice Blindness For a long time I have accepted the widely held view that choice blindness experiments show that much post hoc rationalisation is actually confabulation. I think that was a mistake and understanding why it was a mistake, in particular understanding why it was based on a misunderstanding about the nature of rationalisation, will help us avoid making a much worse mistake with respect to calls for algorithmic transparency and accountability. In choice blindness experiments subje...

Around July or August 1986 I took the Tube to Covent Garden and went to a small, specialist stationery shop on Henrietta Street to buy a Filofax. It was cutting edge personal information technology at the time and it lasted me a long time, until I could afford a Psion 3a in 1994, the first of a long series of 'Personal Digital Assistants' or PDAs that I have owned. Thanks to the magic of .csv, I was able to export contacts across all of them and eventually to my smartphones. I built a very large...

For me, probably the most haunting scene in Coded Bias was the detention on the street of a 14-year old boy. The misuse of state power is shocking when it is applied to a child. One cannot watch that clip without thinking that those officers are just bad human beings. The only justification for treating a child like that would be if they had witnessed something which made them think the 'suspect' was a risk to other people. Which clearly wasn't the case with that young lad. Unfortunately a lot...

Most of what passes for AI is machine learning trained on massive data sets. It is that data which has enabled the dramatic advances we see with generative AI like DALL-E and ChatGPT, but also systems from facial recognition to self-driving vehicles. The data has been collected over the past 15+ years from the internet, which is undoubtedly the largest repository of machine-readable data anyone has ever 'assembled'. In particular, the advent of Web 2.0 and the exponential increase in social med...

Short quotations are more about words than thoughts. Interesting, complex, nuanced thoughts cannot be expressed in a few words and rarely a single sentence. As the propagandists and dystopians (Huxley, Orwell) of the 1930s and 1940s knew so well, political slogans and soundbites are earworms which aim to prevent critique and debate. Which is a roundabout way of explaining why my current favourite inspirational quotation is so long. "To me, what is so radical and genuinely enjoyable about orga...

It seemed a good idea this weekend to remind myself of Umberto Eco's excellent essay 'Ur-Fascism' in How to Spot a Fascist. After some interesting reflections on his own childhood experiences during WW2 and some remarks distinguishing fascism in general from the systematic ideologies of Nazism and Diamat, he identifies 14 distinguishing marks of Ur-Fascism. Theoretically, he claims that 'Fascism' is a family-resemblance term as identified by Wittgenstein, where there is no common feature share...

Public social media posts provide a vast and rich source of data for research and commercial purposes. Posts are date and time stamped, usually geo-located, have an authorial identifier (this could be real name or not, but it is an identity which has data value even in the few cases it cannot be connected to other identities), and usually rich information about readers and their reactions. It is hard for researchers and developers to resist this treasure trove. Who owns the copyright of this ma...