Papers by Noel Fitzpatrick
AI and ethics, Apr 8, 2024
The question of how we can use ethics and ethical frameworks to avert the negative consequences o... more The question of how we can use ethics and ethical frameworks to avert the negative consequences of AI through guidance on human behaviour and the design of technological systems has recently been receiving increasing attention. The appropriate response to an ethics of AI has certainly been contentious. For some years the wisdom of deontology and utilitarianism in the ethics of technology has been questioned. Today, a kind of AI ethics principlism has gained a degree of widespread acceptance, yet it still invites harsh rejections in recent scholarship. In this paper, we wish to explore the contribution to an ethics of AI made by a narrative philosophy and ethics of technology inspired by the 'little ethics' of Paul Ricoeur, and virtue ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre, most recently and promisingly built upon by Wessel Reijers and Mark Coeckelbergh. The objective of this paper is to examine the extent to which a narrative and virtue based ethics (or, VPD, i.e., virtuous practice design) might be a plausible candidate for the foundation of an ethics of AI, or rather ethical AI practice. This will be achieved by exploring the ways in which this approach can respond to some of the significant faults with or critiques of applied and principles and guidelines based ethical approaches to AI ethics.
DS 117: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education (E&PDE 2022), London South Bank University in London, UK. 8th - 9th September 2022
The sustainable development is a big challenge for the end of the century due to earth evolution ... more The sustainable development is a big challenge for the end of the century due to earth evolution linked with anthropic activities: climate change, resources depletion, health stakes and related problems will change the way we live. Engineering design activities will have to evolve to address in a different way human's needs and also new kinds of needs. The ability to change design practices will depend on the way to think the relationship between human and nature. Ethics has a specific place for that. The proposed paper deals with ecological ethics and discuss the way it can be addressed concerning technology and the way it can be taught in terms of pedagogical methods. A first part discusses the concept of ecological ethics and proposes to avoid environmental ethics but develop an ethics of the environment. This position enables to defend to transfer the biodiversity characteristic to techno-diversity one in order to ensure adaptation and resilience, future will require for being able to keep health, comfort levels within environmental constraints. The requirement of a pragmatic approach of ethics and ecology is highlighted to be able to face and be conscious of diversity of situations. Then, a discussion on pedagogy of ecological ethics is done and shows how the link must be built with society, into pedagogical activities.
This assessment method is an opportunity for formative feedback. Students are given an essay titl... more This assessment method is an opportunity for formative feedback. Students are given an essay title in Week 1, with a 500 word submission due in Week 6 or 7. Feedback is given without a mark
This conference paper (in French) explores the construction of interlocution in the monologues of... more This conference paper (in French) explores the construction of interlocution in the monologues of Brian Friel\u27s theatre. It proposes a novel means of analysis of the monologue by mobilising key developments in French pragmatic linguistic analysis of I and You and interlocution
The objective of the project was threefold. Firstly, to propose a first year module entitled "Dev... more The objective of the project was threefold. Firstly, to propose a first year module entitled "Developing Critical Skills", to be available across Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), which would promote, through the analysis of cultural artefacts, the analytical and rhetorical skills of first year students across different disciplines. Secondly, to test and evaluate appropriate assessment procedures for such a module. Thirdly, to explore innovative methods of curriculum design process for interdisciplinary learning. The anticipated benefits of such a module were originally imagined to be the development of students who would possess critical competences with broad application, who would be reflective and analytical, and who would develop awareness of the public responsibilities of knowledge. Further to this, the authors hoped to encourage a greater understanding among students of the value and complexity of culture, cross-disciplinary cooperation among staff teaching the module, and to consolidate the benefits of the modular system within the DIT.
Veterinary Record, 2011
Collaboration between doctors and vets on new techniques can benefit both human and animal patien... more Collaboration between doctors and vets on new techniques can benefit both human and animal patients, and there should be more of it, says Noel Fitzpatrick THE veterinary profession is 250 years old this year. Its founder, Claude Bourgelat, was the first scientist to suggest that studying animal biology and pathology would help to improve our understanding of human biology and pathology. Without this massive step forward the veterinary profession, of which we are all proud to be members, may not have arrived until decades later. 2011 marks the 250th anniversary of the concept of comparative pathobiology, without which modern medicine would never have emerged. In 2011, the human medical profession generally doesn't have any idea what we do as veterinary surgeons, and the medical device and pharmaceutical companies often see the veterinary profession as the people who provide them with experimental evidence for human healthcare products. At the same time there is an ever-increasing awareness of the sentience of animals and their role in society as valuable companions and living creatures with an intrinsic right to a pain-free quality of life. There will not be an endless supply of ‘experimental’ animals, with all of the unpalatable realities that this forces us to think about. Is it time to consider that vets could work with the animal-owning public to provide better solutions for clinical cases and, in so doing, advance veterinary and human medicine, not by sacrificing an animal life, but by saving one? As more and more options emerge for pharmaceutical and surgical intervention to help pet animals, we should rightly ask the question – is it ethically and morally right to push technology to the limit in the pursuit of quality of life, or are they ‘only animals’ and therefore not deserving of the level of care afforded to …
This note aims first to provide a general insight into the key theoretical questions on which are... more This note aims first to provide a general insight into the key theoretical questions on which are central to the Real Smart City project , and then to elaborate on the salient concepts or analysis of each paper of the collection "Guayaquil Archipelago: Epistemological steps towards a Real Smart City". The most relevant issues, such as smartness, noesis, public space and control, compose the set of critical tools by which we attempt to deconstruct the technoideology of the very idea of "Smart Cities". A second goal is to provide an alternative to the image of the network, through which one thinks social relations and the transmission of information and knowledge within digital societies. This is the image of the archipelago, mediated by archipelagic thinking. While the first part of the collection of papers focuses on the relation between the digital and the territory, the second part attempts to deepen the concept of archipelagic thinking and to raise some methodological points inspired by real archipelagos.
Le projet Field Day, qui était à la fois un projet culturel et politique dans les années 1980, tr... more Le projet Field Day, qui était à la fois un projet culturel et politique dans les années 1980, trouve ses origines dans les thématiques des pièces de Friel, à savoir la réinterprétation de l'identité irlandaise dans une optique de réconciliation téléologique. Richard Kearney explique « The present unhappy state of our country would seem to indicate a need for this second centre of gravity. The obvious impotence of the various political attempts to unite the four geographical provinces w[h]ould [sic] seem to warrant another kind of solution…one which would incorporate the 'fifth' province. This province, this place, this centre, is not a political or geographical position; it is more like a disposition .
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License ... more This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Arrow@dit 53 Noel Fitzpatrick Introduction to 'Deconstruction and Aesthetics interview with Bernard Stiegler' 55 Noel Fitzpatrick Introduction to 'Deconstruction and Aesthetics, interview with Bernard Stiegler'
The paper aims to provide both a radical critique of the "smart city" as a techno-ideological app... more The paper aims to provide both a radical critique of the "smart city" as a techno-ideological apparatus, that through data analysis and algorithmic forms of governmentality tends to colonize space and time, and an attempt to reframe the very concept of intelligence within the smart cities. Two concepts are presented as tools for such a reframing: locality and idiom, where the first is conceived as openness of meaning generated by a territory, while the latter, analysed through a paradigmatic Irish example (Friel's play Translations), prepares the ground for the pars construens of the paper. The claim, built by intertwining a set of authors (Ricoeur, Grice, Derrida, Stiegler), is that of passing from smartness and digital networks to the "real smart cities", which aim should point to the development of differential and collective intelligence (noodiversity).
Within English second language acquisition there is an enthusiasm for using authentic text as lea... more Within English second language acquisition there is an enthusiasm for using authentic text as learning materials in classroom and online settings. This enthusiasm, however, is tempered by the difficulty in finding authentic texts at suitable levels of comprehension difficulty for specific groups of learners. An automated way to rate the comprehension difficulty of a text would make finding suitable texts a much more manageable task. While readability metrics have been in use for over 50 years now they only capture a small amount of what constitutes comprehension difficulty. In this paper we examine other features of texts that are related to comprehension difficulty and assess their usefulness in building automated prediction models. We investigate readability metrics, vocabulary-based features, and syntax-based features, and show that the best prediction accuracies are possible with a combination of all three.
On the Exactitude of Big Data: La Bêtise and Artificial Intelligence' This article revisits the q... more On the Exactitude of Big Data: La Bêtise and Artificial Intelligence' This article revisits the question of 'la bêtise' or stupidity in the era of Artificial Intelligence driven by Big Data, it extends on the questions posed by Gille Deleuze and more recently by Bernard Stiegler. However, the framework for revisiting the question of la bêtise will be through the lens of contemporary computer science, in particular the development of data science as a mode of analysis, sometimes, misinterpreted as a mode of intelligence. In particular, this article will argue that with the advent of forms of hype (sometimes referred to as the hype cycle) in relation to big data and modalities of data analytics there is a form of computational stupidity or functional stupidity at work. The exaggerated promises of big data to solve everything are overblown expectations which will lead ultimately to a form of disillusionment with data science. This can be seen in a number of domains, for example smart city technologies, the internet of things, and machine translation. In addition to the negative effects of exaggerated claims of Big Data is the possibility that societal norms will facilitate Big Data technological change by incorporating the bêtise of Big Data, thus leading to a change in our relationship to technology, examples of this would be privacy standards and ownership of data. This paper will conclude by setting out the analysis some of the limitations of Artificial intelligence and Big Data in order to allow a re-examination of the claims made.
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2019
The article sets out to develop the concept of attention as a key aspect to building the possible... more The article sets out to develop the concept of attention as a key aspect to building the possible therapeutics that Bernard Stiegler's recent works have pointed to (The Automatic Society, 2016, The Neganthropocene, 2018 and Qu'appelle-ton Panser, 2018). The therapeutic aspect of pharmacology takes place through processes that are neganthropic; therefore, which attempt to counteract the entropic nature of digital technologies where there is flattening out to the measurable and the calculable of Big Data. The most obvious examples of this flattening out can be seen in relation to the use of natural language processing technologies for text interpretation and the use of text analytics alongside student analytics. However, the process of exosomatisation of knowledge takes place in forms of hypomnesic tertiary retentions or digital technologies. The loss of knowledge is inherent to these processes of exteriorisation, this loss of knowledge takes place through a process proletarianisation which Marx had pointed to in the Grundisse (1939). The therapeutic gesture is, therefore, an intrinsically educational one, where the loss of knowledge of the pharmacological nature of digital technologies is counteracted by other forms of knowledge construction that can be enabled by digital technologies. Hence, there is a profound educational gesture necessary to enable the re-harnessing of technology to enable the therapeutics. This paper will argue that the positive re-harnessing, the therapeutics, can take place through the development of new forms of neganthropic gestures which can be afforded by the development of specific forms of digital technologies. These also enable a contributive research process whereby the rationalisation of the production of knowledge within the university can be challenged by collaborative, interpretative processes of knowledge production.
Kairos. Journal of Philosophy & Science, 2016
The question of fiction is omnipresent within the work of Paul Ricoeur throughout his prolific ca... more The question of fiction is omnipresent within the work of Paul Ricoeur throughout his prolific career. However, Ricoeur raises the questions of fiction in relation to other issues such the symbol, metaphor and narrative. This article sets out to foreground a traditional problem of fiction and logic, which is termed the existence of non-existent objects, in relation to the Paul Ricoeur’s work on narrative. Ricoeur’s understanding of fiction takes place within his overall philosophical anthropology where the fictions and histories make up the very nature of identity both personal and collective. The existence of non-existent objects demonstrates a dichotomy between fiction and history, non-existent objects can exist as fictional objects. The very possibility of the existence of fictional objects entails ontological status considerations. What ontological status do fictional objects have? Ricoeur develops a concept of narrative configuration which is akin to the Kantian productive imag...
The work of Paul Ricoeur has been hugely influential in recent years for literary theory, his wor... more The work of Paul Ricoeur has been hugely influential in recent years for literary theory, his works of the late 1980s and 1990s have revolutionized they way in which narrative is understood as key tenant to the construction of narrative identity and the narrative self. In particular Time and Narrative has become a part of the literary canon of a texts for the study of narrative in the modern novel, especially. Metaphor and Narrative have been largely accepted as the way in which Ricoeur approached Aesthetics and Aesthetic experience. However, with recent debates about the role of 'the visual' and the nature of visual semiotics in contemporary Critical Theory-Critical Theory taken in a wider sense than that of the Frankfurt school Critical Theory, Critical Theory which embraces post-structuralism and contemporary philosophy-it is an opportune moment to revisit Paul Ricoeur's earlier work to investigate possible contributions of hermeneutic phenomenology to the development of a fresh approach to this debate in contemporary Critical Theory, a criticism which would attempt to go beyond the predominant mode discourse of visual semiotics, where communicability is restricted to the speaking signs. While as Mieke Bal has convincingly argued that the process of semiosis is capable of embracing the verbal and visual practices of the sign, it is necessary for the purposes of this paper to revisit the fundamental relationship between word and image. The notion of Ekphrasis has a specific historical trajectory, from the Greek ek and phrasis, literarly to 'out' 'speak', to 'speak out' to name an object to the "verbal representation of visual representation" from James Heffernan (1991) 1. Plato in Phradreus 1 See Ekphrasis and the Other, footnote p.152, This definition of ekphrasis as "the verbal representation of visual representation" is also the basis for James
Concepts, Methodologies, Tools and Applications
Wikis are frequently cited in Higher Education research as appropriate and powerful web spaces wh... more Wikis are frequently cited in Higher Education research as appropriate and powerful web spaces which provide opportunities to capture, discuss, and review individual, group, project or organisational activities. These activities, in turn, offer possibilities for knowledge development by utilising wiki collaborative active spaces. The chapter uses selected case studies examples to illustrate the use of wikis to support online community based tasks, project development/process, collaborative materials development and various student and peer supported activities. A key focus of the chapter centres on evaluating the effectiveness (or otherwise) of wikis to create online communities to support knowledge management (development, retention and transfer). See Choy & Ng (2007), Lamb (2004), Elgort (2008), Raman et al. (2005). By way of contextualising the studies, a variety of uses of wikis in higher education are reviewed as part of this chapter.
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Papers by Noel Fitzpatrick