Healthcare is becoming increasingly automated with the development and deployment of care robots. There are many benefits to care robots but they also pose many challenging ethical issues. This paper takes care robots for the elderly as the subject of analysis, building on previous literature in the domain of the ethics and design of care robots. Using the value sensitive design approach to technology design, this paper extends its application to care robots by integrating the values of care, values that (...) are specific to AI, and higher-scale values such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The ethical issues specific to care robots for the elderly are discussed at length alongside examples of specific design requirements that work to ameliorate these ethical concerns. (shrink)

Traditional medical practices and relationships are changing given the widespread adoption of AI-driven technologies across the various domains of health and healthcare. In many cases, these new technologies are not specific to the field of healthcare. Still, they are existent, ubiquitous, and commercially available systems upskilled to integrate these novel care practices. Given the widespread adoption, coupled with the dramatic changes in practices, new ethical and social issues emerge due to how these systems nudge users into making decisions and changing (...) behaviours. This article discusses how these AI-driven systems pose particular ethical challenges with regards to nudging. To confront these issues, the value sensitive design approach is adopted as a principled methodology that designers can adopt to design these systems to avoid harming and contribute to the social good. The AI for Social Good factors are adopted as the norms constraining maleficence. In contrast, higher-order values specific to AI, such as those from the EU High-Level Expert Group on AI and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, are adopted as the values to be promoted as much as possible in design. The use case of Amazon Alexa's Healthcare Skills is used to illustrate this design approach. It provides an exemplar of how designers and engineers can begin to orientate their design programs of these technologies towards the social good. (shrink)

New technologies are the source of uncertainties about the applicability of moral and morally connotated concepts. These uncertainties sometimes call for conceptual engineering, but it is not often recognized when this is the case. We take this to be a missed opportunity, as a recognition that different researchers are working on the same kind of project can help solve methodological questions that one is likely to encounter. In this paper, we present three case studies where philosophers of technology implicitly engage (...) in conceptual engineering (without naming it as such). We subsequently reflect on the case studies to find out how these illustrate conceptual engineering as an appropriate method to deal with pressing concerns in the philosophy of technology. We have two main goals. We first want to contribute to the literature on conceptual engineering by presenting concrete examples of conceptual engineering in the philosophy of technology. This is especially relevant, because the technologies that are designed based on the conceptual work done by philosophers of technology potentially have crucial moral and social implications. Secondly, we want to make explicit what choices are made when doing this conceptual work. Making explicit that some of the implicit assumptions are, in fact, debated in the literature allows for reflection on these questions. Ultimately, our hope is that conscious reflection leads to an improvement of the conceptual work done. (shrink)

Technological developments involving robotics and artificial intelligence devices are being employed evermore in elderly care and the healthcare sector more generally, raising ethical issues and practical questions warranting closer considerations of what we mean by “care” and, subsequently, how to design such software coherently with the chosen definition. This paper starts by critically examining the existing approaches to the ethical design of care robots provided by Aimee van Wynsberghe, who relies on the work on the ethics of care by Joan (...) Tronto. In doing so, it suggests an alternative to their non-principled approach, an alternative suited to tackling some of the issues raised by Tronto and van Wynsberghe, while allowing for the inclusion of two orientative principles. Our proposal centres on the principles of autonomy and vulnerability, whose joint adoption we deem able to constitute an original revision of a bottom-up approach in care ethics. Conclusively, the ethical framework introduced here integrates more traditional approaches in care ethics in view of enhancing the debate regarding the ethical design of care robots under a new lens. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a methodology to maximize the benefits of interdisciplinary cooperation in AI research groups. Firstly, we build the case for the importance of interdisciplinarity in research groups as the best means to tackle the social implications brought about by AI systems, against the backdrop of the EU Commission proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Act. As we are an interdisciplinary group, we address the multi-faceted implications of the mass-scale diffusion of AI-driven technologies. The result of our exercise (...) lead us to postulate the necessity of a behavioural theory that standardizes the interaction process of interdisciplinary groups. In light of this, we conduct a review of the existing approaches to interdisciplinary research on AI appliances, leading to the development of methodologies like ethics-by-design and value-sensitive design, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. We then put forth an iterative process theory hinging on a narrative approach consisting of four phases: definition of the hypothesis space, building-up of a common lexicon, scenario-building, interdisciplinary self-assessment. Finally, we identify the most relevant fields of application for such a methodology and discuss possible case studies. (shrink)

The pervasiveness of AI-empowered technologies across multiple sectors has led to drastic changes concerning traditional social practices and how we relate to one another. Moreover, market-driven Big Tech corporations are now entering public domains, and concerns have been raised that they may even influence public agenda and research. Therefore, this chapter focuses on assessing and evaluating what kind of business model is desirable to incentivise the AI for Social Good (AI4SG) factors. In particular, the chapter explores the implications of this (...) discourse for SDG #17 (global partnership) and how this goal may encourage Big Tech corporations to strengthen multi-stakeholder partnerships that promote effective public-private and civil society partnerships and the meaningful co-presence of non-market and market values. In doing so, the chapter proposes an analysis of the sociological notion of "social license to operate" (SLO) elaborated in the mining and extractive industry literature and introduces it into the discourse on sustainable digital business models and responsible management of risks in the digital age. This serves to explore how such a social license can be adopted as a practice by digital business models to foster trust, collaboration and coordination among different actors - AI researchers and initiatives, institutions and civil society at large - for the support of SDGs interrelated targets and goals. (shrink)

Although still highly controversial, the idea that we can use technology to radically alter our environment in order to mitigate the climate challenges we now face is becoming an ever more discussed approach. This chapter takes up a specific climate engineering technology, carbon capture, usage, and storage (CCUS), and highlights how this technology works and how its governance still needs further work to ensure that it is aligned to the ideal of sustainable development. Given that climate engineering technologies like CCUS (...) have the potential to ameliorate many of the climate issues and support the SDGs, there remains a lacuna of inserting these globally impactful technologies within a normative political framework to respect that proper responsibility is attributed. The aim of the chapter is to examine the concept of accountability, how it has been traditionally understood in the literature, and why a polysemic and multidimensional account of accountability is required if climate engineering technologies like CCUS are actually to support sustainable development. This may serve as a first theoretically informed basis for reflection on how to create a synergy between the responsible deployment of climate engineering innovation and the achievement of the SDGs targets, one that can shed light on how justifications and decisions about sustainable strategies and constraints are managed, taken and communicated. (shrink)

El asesinato de George Floyd en Minneapolis (Estados Unidos) ha desatado múltiples manifestaciones sociales antirracistas en distintos países del mundo, las cuales han adquirido diferentes formatos: marchas, disturbios, pintadas callejeras, militancia hashtag a partir del lema #BlackLiveMatters y el accionar contra diferentes estatuas de personajes históricos polémicos. Dichos monumentos, conmemoraciones a, principalmente, esclavistas y colonizadores, han sido pintados, mutilados o derribados en señal de protesta, pero también como un modo de disputa por los sentidos y las memorias legitimadas en el (...) espacio público, que, además, tiene como antecedente las manifestaciones en Chile a fines de 2019. (shrink)

In the causal modeling literature, it is well known that ill-defined variables may give rise to ambiguous manipulations. Here, we illustrate how ill-defined variables may also induce mistakes in causal inference when standard causal search methods are applied. To address the problem, we introduce a representation framework, which exploits an independent component representation of the data, and demonstrate its potential for detecting ill-defined variables and avoiding mistaken causal inferences.

El 24 de marzo en Argentina es una fecha en la cual se realizan en todo el país marchas y actos encabezados por las organizaciones de derechos humanos en conmemoración de las víctimas de la última dictadura cívico-militar iniciada en 1976. Sin embargo, durante los años 2020 y 2021 esta fecha estuvo signada por diferentes condicionamientos dado el Covid-19. En contexto de ASPO y DISPO, ¿qué memorias se activaron y pusieron a circular esos días? ¿Qué soportes y herramientas fueron fundamentales? (...) ¿Cómo fueron esos paisajes visuales de la memoria? ¿Cómo se conjugaron el activismo offline y el activismo online? Estas son algunas de las preguntas que se irán desentrañando a lo largo del texto. A partir del análisis, se observa una (re)configuración en los modos de hacer memoria colectiva que implicó nuevos desafíos a la hora de pensar su defensa/disputa y transmisión. Asimismo, hubo una renovación de las estrategias visuales desde las materialidades y formas y desde los modos de circulación, a la vez que se sumaron voces y luchas del presente que reavivaron el sentido de los trabajos de memoria para visibilizar problemáticas actuales y ampliar derechos que consoliden la democracia. (shrink)

Desde una perspectiva posfundacional, la política no puede reducirse a una región de lo social, ya que lo político, como momento de activación, es ubicuo, desterritorializado y emerge de forma contingente. Esto abre las puertas a percibir el surgimiento de lo político en cualquier espacio, independientemente de si permanece o no dentro del terreno institucional de la política. Chantal Mouffe ha desarrollado en algunos de sus escritos la relación entre arte y política desde esta perspectiva, cuestión que suele pasar inadvertida (...) pero que resulta de vital interés para el campo de los estudios sociales del arte. Asimismo, su propuesta de arte político se ubica en la antítesis de muchos trabajos y análisis de casos que, desde las ciencias sociales y estudios del arte, han abordado la politicidad del arte centrados en una relación directa entre la producción artística y la temática a la que refiere la obra. En este sentido, sostenemos que la politicidad no se reduce a la temática de las prácticas artísticas sino que tiene relación con el sujeto productor, el modo de producción de la obra (individual o colectivo) y de intervención; producción en lo social, especialmente en el espacio. Estas cuestiones, como ya veremos, aparecen desarrolladas de manera muy interesante en algunos escritos de Chantal Mouffe. De este modo, en este artículo, a la par que nos proponemos presentar su propuesta de análisis para las prácticas artísticas, produciremos reflexiones y análisis de diversas producciones artísticas, con el fin de mostrar tanto la utilidad de la teoría resituada en estas latitudes como sus flaquezas. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide an original account of the distinction between the spheres of Sitten that goes beyond the traditional one based on the nature of incentives, since this underestimates some of their characteristics. First, the paper identifies in obligatio a common source between Ethics and Right. Then, it explores how in the Metaphysics of Morals the connection between law and incentive constitutes a more relevant criterion to distinguish ethical lawgiving from juridical lawgiving. Specifically, it demonstrates (...) that such connection: to be ethical should be linear, understood as a necessary self-determined process of connecting law to incentive; to be juridical should be mediated, namely it comprises an inclusive disjunction between two modalities of connecting law to incentive: a non-necessary linear and a divergent one. It concludes by exploring the implications of such perspective on the notions of internalisation and externalisation associated to each lawgiving. (shrink)

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, many conspiracy theories have spread widely, which has the potential to reduce adherence to recommended preventive measures. Specifically, anti-vaccine conspiracy beliefs can have a strong negative impact on COVID-19 vaccination attitude and intention. The present study aimed to clarify how such beliefs can reduce vaccination intention, exploring the possible mediating roles of attitude toward vaccination, trust in science, and trust in government, among a sample of 822 unvaccinated Italian adults. Path analysis showed that anti-vaccine conspiracy (...) beliefs influenced intention to get vaccinated both directly and indirectly through the mediating effects of attitude, trust in science, and trust in government. In particular, the simple mediating effect of attitude was the strongest one, followed by the serial mediating effect of trust in science and attitude itself. Findings provide insights into the design of interventions aimed at reducing misinformation and subsequent vaccine hesitancy. (shrink)

Introducción al dosier: “La furia iconoclasta. A propósito de los usos públicos de monumentos en la historia reciente".

En esta entrevista, conversamos con el Dr. Alejandro De Oto sobre las potencialidades de los estudios poscoloniales a la hora de comprender la configuración de espacios e imágenes de culto, consagrados, venerados o denostados y su vínculo con la historia, las memorias legitimadas y las subalternas, las identidades y las luchas de poder.