Papers by Johnathan C Flowers
In 2017, Amazon discontinued an attempt at developing a hiring algorithm which would enable the c... more In 2017, Amazon discontinued an attempt at developing a hiring algorithm which would enable the company to streamline its hiring processes due to apparent gender discrimination. Specifically, the algorithm, trained on over a decade's worth of resumes submitted to Amazon, learned to penalize applications that contained references to women, that indicated graduation from all women's colleges, or otherwise indicated that an applicant was not male. Amazon's algorithm took up the history of Amazon's applicant pool and integrated it into its present "problematic situation," for the purposes of future action. Consequently, Amazon declared the project a failure: even after attempting to edit the algorithm to ensure neutrality to terms like "women," Amazon executives were not convinced that the algorithm would not engage in biased sorting of applicants. While the incident was held up as yet another way in which bias derailed an application of machine learning, this paper contends that the "failure," viewed phenomenologically and pragmatically, could be articulated as a success. Specifically, this paper contends that if we view the algorithm's bias as making present that which is habitual, or that which fades into the social background, these failures could be valuable tools for evaluating current social and cultural practices. Thus, this paper contends that, rather than treating biased algorithms as "failures," it may be more productive to view algorithmic bias as demonstrative of a social or cultural organization that gives rise to bias. These biased algorithms, therefore, function as modes of diagnosing the ways in which inequalities are institutionalized and replicated within organizations. They are, for John Dewey, forms of technology, insofar as technology refers to the methods of inquiry into problematic situations, which serve to make clear the organization of our society. This paper argues that we should take seriously the results of biased algorithms, not as the projected completion of action, but as processes of inquiry that indicate the ways in which our society is organized to replicate inequality.
Given the increasing encroachment of Twitter into offline experience, it has become necessary to ... more Given the increasing encroachment of Twitter into offline experience, it has become necessary to look beyond the formation of identity in online spaces to the ways in which identities surface through the formation of affective communities organized through the use of technocultural assemblages, or the platforms, algorithms, and digital networks through which affect circulates in an online space. This essay focuses on the microblogging website Twitter as one such technocultural assemblage whose hashtag functionality allows for the circulation of affect among bodies which "surface" within the affective communities organized on Twitter through their alignment with and orientation by hashtags which serve as "orientation devices" to direct some bodies towards some affective communities and not others. Thus, this paper contends that "Asian Twitter," "Black Twitter," "Academic Twitter," and other such "twitter territories" can only be identified through the ways in which they circulate affect through the technocultural assemblage that is twitter, and are thus identifiable by an affect that circulates through the territories and sticks to the members of those territories. This affective politics of twitter can provide an inroad into understanding the formation of online communities as an affective construction mediated through the technocultural assemblages of the platform of Twitter.
National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2019
This paper aims to reconsider the "artificial" nature of AI not as a result of the simulation of ... more This paper aims to reconsider the "artificial" nature of AI not as a result of the simulation of the human organism, but as the result of a disconnection from experience. Experience, in this context, is defined as the ways in which an organism is in nature through culture or has a world which is defined by a universe of discourse. To this end, an artificial intelligence is only "artificial" insofar as it is disconnected from the ways in which the world is experienced as mediated by culture. Put simply, artificial intelligence will cease to be "artificial" the moment it is implicated in nature through culture, at which point it will become "intelligent" or "conscious."
Philosophy East and West, 2018
Scholarly study of Asian martial arts by Western authors in Western languages is new. There is as... more Scholarly study of Asian martial arts by Western authors in Western languages is new. There is as yet not a lot of good material. There are now studies of Asian martial arts history presented by Peter Lorge as Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and of the cultural phenomena of their contemporary global practice published by Paul Bowman as Martial Arts Studies: Disrupting Disciplinary Boundaries (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015). As yet, however, there is almost no literature discussing the philosophical dimensions of Asian martial arts. This book is the first book to do so innovatively. The book studies Asian martial arts from four points of view. The first chapter explores Asian martial arts' relation to classical Chinese philosophy, especially Confucian and Daoist thought and the bing fa, art of war philosophy. In the second chapter, the author investigates relations of these martial arts traditions to Western thought, especially Greek athletics and the mind-body problem. A third chapter explores the aesthetic dimension of Asian martial arts. The author especially focuses on what it feels like and looks like both to practitioners and to audiences. Finally, the fourth chapter takes up the ethical question of the relation of these arts and their skills to violence. These arts are arts of weapons, even if only hands and legs. In training these arts, practitioners should reflect on the many problemslegal, moral, psychological, and philosophicalassociated with skill and practice in the use of violence. Many readers, both scholars and interested lay practitioners of martial arts may find that they agree with most of the thoughts and arguments inspiringly discussed by the author. In particular, though the Asian martial arts perhaps were originally designed to protect and to engage in combat for the security of human societies, the martial arts are not usually practiced with a violent purpose and do no harm (although they certainly could). Many may also agree with Allen's argument that the martial arts and their training are vested in life and address the ethical problem of a response to violence. Allen's historical and philosophical material concerning the Asian martial arts' origins as well as contemporary practice may well prove this argument. However, dance or sport can also provide many of the same qualities of life for those who practice them. The important matter is perhaps to recognize the various values of physical exercise of all varieties, including the martial arts, for how individuals perceive working toward their life aims through the exercise. Asian martial arts could be, and have been, many thingsmilitary, educational, ethical, and so on. And they can be a philosophical, aesthetic, or health promoting practice for contemporary society. The author attractively stimulates the audience with ancient Chinese philosophical thoughts, which
Springer eBooks, Oct 31, 2017
Flowers offers an insightful look at the figure of the black nerd in American popular culture and... more Flowers offers an insightful look at the figure of the black nerd in American popular culture and its relation to black masculinity. Focusing on four characters across multiple television and cinematic genres, the chapter discusses how the image of the black nerd serves to reinforce dominant images of black masculinity in popular culture. Flowers also explores the implications of the narrow range of representations of the black nerd for understanding the construction of black masculinity in African-American culture. “How Is It Okay to Be a Black Nerd?” concludes with a discussion of the lack of female representations of the black nerd in American popular culture, and its implications for the black community.
Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture, Apr 30, 2022
This paper aims to reframe disability through John Dewey's transactional theory of culture to ind... more This paper aims to reframe disability through John Dewey's transactional theory of culture to indicate how disability is not located in the biological organization of the individual nor in the organization of culture, but in the transactions between the two. This paper will apply Dewey's theory of culture to disability studies and philosophy of disability and then to ADHD to make clear the benefits of a transactional model of disability.
Routledge eBooks, Feb 17, 2021
Traditional theories of gender performativity, grounded in the tradition of Judith Butler, fail t... more Traditional theories of gender performativity, grounded in the tradition of Judith Butler, fail to capture the experience of encountering a gendered subject. By reducing gender to a series of discursive acts and ignoring the aesthetic dimension of gender, these theories neglect the possibility for alternative gender performances divorced from the materiality of the body, except through acknowledging the ficticious nature of gender as a consequence of citational acts. In contrast, this dissertation presents a theory of gender as aware, or the “aboutness” that emerges through the repeated citational acts that make present gender in our lived experience. Gender, therefore, does not possess any ontological essence except insofar as it is articulated by citational practices, without which it cannot exist. To this end, this dissertation argues for an expansion of our discourse on gender through appealing to Japanese aesthetic and poetic concepts of aware and mono no aware to demonstrate the aesthetic nature of gender. In so doing this dissertation will present gender as fundamentally aesthetic through appeal to no, kabuki, and the Takarazuka Revue, all sites which divorced gender form biological sex for the purpose of an aesthetic praxis
UMI. ProQuest® Dissertations & Theses The world's most comprehensive collection of disse... more UMI. ProQuest® Dissertations & Theses The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest. Aware as a theory of Japanese aesthetics. by Flowers, Johnathan Charles, MA, SOUTHERN ...
2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Jun 20, 2022
How has recent AI Ethics literature addressed topics such as fairness and justice in the context ... more How has recent AI Ethics literature addressed topics such as fairness and justice in the context of continued social and structural power asymmetries? We trace both the historical roots and current landmark work that have been shaping the field and categorize these works under three broad umbrellas: (i) those grounded in Western canonical philosophy, (ii) mathematical and statistical methods, and (iii) those emerging from critical data/algorithm/information studies. We also survey the field and explore emerging trends by examining the rapidly growing body of literature that falls under the broad umbrella of AI Ethics. To that end, we read and annotated peer-reviewed papers published over the past four years in two premier conferences: FAccT and AIES. We organize the literature based on an annotation scheme we developed according to three main dimensions: whether the paper deals with concrete applications, use-cases, and/or people's lived experience; to what extent it addresses harmed, threatened, or otherwise marginalized groups; and if so, whether it explicitly names such groups. We note that although the goals of the majority of FAccT and AIES papers were often commendable, their consideration of the negative impacts of AI on traditionally marginalized groups remained shallow. Taken together, our conceptual analysis and the data from annotated papers indicate that the field would benefit from an increased focus This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.
Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
The last 3 years have resulted in machine learning (ML)-based image generators with the ability t... more The last 3 years have resulted in machine learning (ML)-based image generators with the ability to output consistently higher quality images based on natural language prompts as inputs. As a result, many popular commercial "generative AI Art" products have entered the market, making generative AI an estimated $48B industry [125]. However, many professional artists have spoken up about the harms they have experienced due to the proliferation of large scale image generators trained on image/text pairs from the Internet. In this paper, we review some of these harms which include reputational damage, economic loss, plagiarism and copyright infringement. To guard against these issues while reaping the potential benefits of image generators, we provide recommendations such as regulation that forces organizations to disclose their training data, and tools that help artists prevent using their content as training data without their consent.
The journal of the philosophy of disability, 2022
Avatar: The Last Airbender and Philosophy, Nov 4, 2022
With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy
In this chapter, Jonathan Flowers offers an important critique of some of the foundational tenets... more In this chapter, Jonathan Flowers offers an important critique of some of the foundational tenets of comics studies and questions the epistemological grounding on which our pedagogies stand. By exploring how Scott McCloud’s work has shaped our field, Flowers deftly illustrates that this field is constantly moving and evokes a call for new voices and pedagogies. He does this through interlinking power and visibility with politics and race within the field of comics studies.
Precollege philosophy and public practice, 2022
2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
How has recent AI Ethics literature addressed topics such as fairness and justice in the context ... more How has recent AI Ethics literature addressed topics such as fairness and justice in the context of continued social and structural power asymmetries? We trace both the historical roots and current landmark work that have been shaping the field and categorize these works under three broad umbrellas: (i) those grounded in Western canonical philosophy, (ii) mathematical and statistical methods, and (iii) those emerging from critical data/algorithm/information studies. We also survey the field and explore emerging trends by examining the rapidly growing body of literature that falls under the broad umbrella of AI Ethics. To that end, we read and annotated peer-reviewed papers published over the past four years in two premier conferences: FAccT and AIES. We organize the literature based on an annotation scheme we developed according to three main dimensions: whether the paper deals with concrete applications, use-cases, and/or people's lived experience; to what extent it addresses harmed, threatened, or otherwise marginalized groups; and if so, whether it explicitly names such groups. We note that although the goals of the majority of FAccT and AIES papers were often commendable, their consideration of the negative impacts of AI on traditionally marginalized groups remained shallow. Taken together, our conceptual analysis and the data from annotated papers indicate that the field would benefit from an increased focus This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.
Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture
This paper aims to reframe disability through John Dewey's transactional theory of culture to ind... more This paper aims to reframe disability through John Dewey's transactional theory of culture to indicate how disability is not located in the biological organization of the individual nor in the organization of culture, but in the transactions between the two. This paper will apply Dewey's theory of culture to disability studies and philosophy of disability and then to ADHD to make clear the benefits of a transactional model of disability.
International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies, 2021
This paper will resituate the presumed accessibility gains that have emerged in the wake of COVID... more This paper will resituate the presumed accessibility gains that have emerged in the wake of COVID-19 not as gains for disabled people, but rather as the products of a world that is prepared for some people and some bodies and not for other people and other bodies. I will show that a more productive approach to understanding the sudden possibility of impossible accommodations would be accomplished by drawing upon Sara Ahmed's treatment of the inheritance of a world, inheritance that places some objects within one's reach while denying one access to other objects. On this view, ableism, as an organizing force in the world, serves to determine what bodies can and cannot do by virtue of the way that it “prepares” the world for some bodies and not for other bodies. As I will argue, the previous impossibility of the current widespread accommodations in academia and society broadly was due to the inheritance of an ableist world. designed to be inherited by some people and their bod...
This paper aims to reconsider the “artificial” nature of AI not as a result of the simulation of ... more This paper aims to reconsider the “artificial” nature of AI not as a result of the simulation of the human organism, but as the result of a disconnection from experience. Experience, in this context, is defined as the ways in which an organism is in nature through culture or has a world which is defined by a universe of discourse. To this end, an artificial intelligence is only “artificial” insofar as it is disconnected from the ways in which the world is experienced as mediated by culture. Put simply, artificial intelligence will cease to be “artificial” the moment it is implicated in nature through culture, at which point it will become “intelligent” or “conscious.”
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Papers by Johnathan C Flowers