CHOICE PUBLICATIONS

Many endeavours in Artificial Intelligence work towards recreating the dialogical capabilities of humans in machines, robots, ”creatures”, in short information processing systems. This original goal in AI has been left to the wayside by many in order to produce Artificial Life entities in a futuristic vision of ’life-as-it-could-be’; scientists that have not ’abandoned ship’ confirm the difficulty of reaching the summum of AI research. This means the importance of language generation and understanding components have been reduced. Are the pragmatics of language use too difficult to deal with? According to Shapiro and Rapaport (1991), ”the quintessential natural-language competence task is interactive dialogue”. Man-made entities are not functional in dialoguing with humans. The benefits of re-establishing a ”proper” relational stance in the Artificial Sciences are twofold, namely, a./to better understand the communication difficulties encountered, and b./to bring enhanced meaning to the goals of building artificial agents. Point a has consequences for b in that it will change the very goals of scientists working on social and conversational agents. In the literature, the notion of agent proves unsuitable for the specification of any higher-order communication tasks; a Tower of Babel problem exists with regards to the very definition of ”agent” between Scientists and Philosophers. In the present article, I eliminate the nebulosity currently contouring agency’s terminology with a goal to improving understanding when speaking about entities that can mean.

Among ethicists and engineers within robotics there is an ongoing discussion as to whether ethical robots are possible or even desirable. We answer both of these questions in the positive, based on an extensive literature study of existing arguments. Our contribution consists in bringing together and reinterpreting pieces of information from a variety of sources. One of the conclusions drawn is that artifactual morality must come in degrees and depend on the level of agency, autonomy and intelligence of the machine. Moral concerns for agents such as intelligent search machines are relatively simple, while highly intelligent and autonomous artifacts with significant impact and complex modes of agency must be equipped with more advanced ethical capabilities. Systems like cognitive robots are being developed that are expected to become part of our everyday lives in future decades. Thus, it is necessary to ensure that their behaviour is adequate. In an analogy with artificial intelligence, which is the ability of a machine to perform activities that would require intelligence in humans, artificial morality is considered to be the ability of a machine to perform activities that would require morality in humans. The capacity for artificial (artifactual) morality, such as artifactual agency, artifactual responsibility, artificial intentions, artificial (synthetic) emotions, etc., come in varying degrees and depend on the type of agent. As an illustration, we address the assurance of safety in modern High Reliability Organizations through responsibility distribution. In the same way that the concept of agency is generalized in the case of artificial agents, the concept of moral agency, including responsibility, is generalized too. We propose to look at artificial moral agents as having functional responsibilities within a network of distributed responsibilities in a socio-technological system. This does not take away the responsibilities of the other stakeholders in the system, but facilitates an understanding and regulation of such networks. It should be pointed out that the process of development must assume an evolutionary form with a number of iterations because the emergent properties of artifacts must be tested in real world situations with agents of increasing intelligence and moral competence. We see this paper as a contribution to the macro-level Requirement Engineering through discussion and analysis of general requirements for design of ethical robots.

Mälardalen University, 2006

The recent development of the research field of Computing and Philosophy has triggered investigations into the theoretical foundations of computing and information. This thesis is the outcome of studies in two areas of Philosophy of Computing (PC) and Philosophy of Information (PI)-the production of meaning (semantics) and the value system with applications (ethics).

Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, 2012

Luciano Floridi's Information Ethics (IE) is a new theoretical foundation of Ethics. According to Floridi, ICT with all informational structures and processes generates our new informational habitat, the Infosphere. For IE, moral action is an information processing pattern. IE addresses the fundamentally informational character of our interaction with the world, including interactions with other agents.

How to model meaning processes (semiosis) in artificial semiotic systems? Once all computer simulation becomes tantamount to theoretical simulation, involving epistemological metaphors of world versions, the selection and choice of models will dramatically compromise the nature of all work involving simulation. According to the pragmatic Peircean based approach, semiosis is an interpreter-dependent process that cannot be dissociated from the notion of a situated (and actively distributed) communicational agent. Our approach centers on the consideration of relevant properties and aspects of Peirce’s pragmatic concept of semiotics. Upon developing this approach, we have no pretensions of our being able to present an exhaustive analysis of the differences between Peirce and other theoretical positions. Nevertheless, our contribution will serve to demonstrate how theorists contribute toward revealing certain fundamental ‘semiotic constraints’ that will be of interest and importance.

computers & philosophy

This last chapter is intended to clarify some central methodological aspects of morphodynamical abduction as regards dynamical systems and the catastrophe theory. Some problems arise in the classical computational approach to cognition in describing the most interesting abductive issues. A cognitive process (and thus abduction) is described by the manipulation of internal semiotic representations of external world. This view assumes a discrete set of representations fixed in discrete time jumps and, because of its functionalist character, cannot render the embodied dimension of cognition and the issue of anticipation and causation of a new hypothesis adequately. An integration of the traditional computational view with some ideas developed within the so-called dynamical approach and catastrophe theory can lead to important insights. What is the role of abduction in the dynamical system approach?What is the role of the “salient/pregnant” dichotomy with respect to abduction?What is embodied cognition from the point of view of its “physics”?

… of the 2008 conference on Tenth …, 2008

Abstract. Roboethics is a recently developed field of applied ethics which deals with the ethical aspects of technologies such as robots, ambient intelligence, direct neural interfaces and invasive nano-devices and intelligent soft bots. In this article we look specifically at the issue of (moral) responsibility in artificial intelligent systems. We argue for a pragmatic approach, where responsibility is seen as a social regulatory mechanism. We claim that having a system which takes care of certain tasks intelligently, learning from experience ...

We live in a computing universe. It is not only that we are vitally dependent on computers in our work and surrounded by ubiquitous computing in our daily lives. Even the Cosmos nowadays is envisaged as a network of computational processes, the stance known as pancomputationalism or naturalist computationalism. In the complementary outlook, the universe, on its most fundamental physical level, is seen as consisting of information which is a view of paninformationalism or informational structural realism.