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Outsourcing Without Fear?

This is the second in a series of blogposts by the members of the Expanding Autonomy project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

by Neil Levy

As Adam Carter emphasises in the first post in this series, offloading cognitive capacities comes at a cost: the more we depend on external scaffolding and supports to perform a certain task, the less we develop the internal capacities to perform that task. The phenomenon is familiar: people probably really are much less able to do mental arithmetic today than in the past, thanks to the introduction of the calculator. We tend to think of new technologies when we worry about what we lose as a consequence of scaffolding, but the concern is ancient. In the Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates approvingly recounting the story of an Egyptian king who worried that the invention of writing “will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, through lack of practice at using their memory.”Read More »Outsourcing Without Fear?

Playing the Game of Faces with AI

Written by Edmond Awad

 

In the popular series “Game of Thrones” (and the corresponding “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels), the “Game of Faces” is a training method used by the Faceless Men, an enigmatic guild of assassins. This method teaches trainees to convincingly adopt the face of others for their covert missions.

The Game of Faces can be seen as a metaphor for the way we interact with others in the real world, as well as the way we present ourselves online. In the Game of Thrones TV series, the Faceless Men are able to change their appearance at will, which allows them to deceive others and get close to their targets. This ability can be seen as a symbol of the power of deception and manipulation.Read More »Playing the Game of Faces with AI

AI As A Writing Tool: Great Benefits, Major Pitfalls.

Written by Neil Levy

Large language models look set to transform every aspect of life over the coming decades. Some of these changes will be dramatic. I’m pretty unconcerned by the apocalyptic scenarios that preoccupy some people, but much more worried about the elimination of jobs (interestingly, the jobs that seem likeliest to be eliminated are those that require the most training: we may see a reversal of status and economic position between baristas and bureaucrats, bricklayers and barristers). Here, though, I’m going to look at much less dramatic, and very much near term, effects that LLMs might have on academic writing. I’m going to focus on the kind of writing I do in philosophy; LLMs will have different impacts on different disciplines.

Read More »AI As A Writing Tool: Great Benefits, Major Pitfalls.

Resisting Nudges

By Gabriel De Marco

Consider the following case:

Classic Food Placement (FP): In order to encourage healthy eating, cafeteria staff place healthy food options at eye-level, whereas unhealthy options are placed lower down. Diners are more likely to pick healthy foods and less likely to pick unhealthy foods than they would have been otherwise.

This intervention is a paradigmatic case of what are often called nudges. Though many will think that it is OK to implement this sort of intervention for these sorts of purposes, there is a large debate about when exactly this is OK.

One common theme is that whether such an influence is easy to resist is going to be relevant to when the intervention is OK. If the intervention is not easy to resist, then, at the very least, this counts as a strike against implementing it. However, though there is often reference to the resistibility of a nudge, there is rarely explicit discussion of what it is for a nudge to be easy to resist, or for it to be easily resistible.

To begin giving an account of what it is for a nudge to be (easily) resistible, we need to figure out what it is an ability to do. So, what is it to resist a nudge?

Read More »Resisting Nudges

‘Naming and Shaming: Responding to Lookism’

On the evening of Friday 9 June, Prof. Heather Widdows presented the inaugural Michael Lockwood Memorial Lecture, as part of a weekend of events to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the fifth of the MSt. in Practical Ethics, based in the Centre. The title of Prof. Widdows’ fascinating and suggestive lecture was ‘Naming and Shaming: Responding to Lookism’.Read More »‘Naming and Shaming: Responding to Lookism’

Video Interview: Introducing Academic Visitor Dr María de Jesús Medina Arellano

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An interview with academic visitor Dr María de Jesús Medina Arellano, Professor and Researcher at the Institute of Legal Research at the National Autonomous University (UNAM), on her research focusing on the ethics and regulation of biotechnologies in developing countries, such as stem cell science, human genome editing and reproductive technologies.

Book Launch: Pandemic Ethics: From Covid-19 to Disease X

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Press release and an interview with Prof Dominic Wilkinson on the new book, Pandemic Ethics: From Covid-19 to Disease X, which he has co-authored with Prof Julian Savulescu.

Press Release: Are we ethically prepared for Disease X?


image of pandemic ethics book cover
Oxford University Press

1 May 2023

According to some estimates, there is more than a one in four chance in the next decade of another global pandemic. We don’t know whether this will be influenza, a coronavirus (like SARS and COVID), or something completely new. The World Health Organisation refers to this unknown future threat as “Disease X”.Read More »Book Launch: Pandemic Ethics: From Covid-19 to Disease X

How Brain-to-Brain Interfaces Will Make Things Difficult for Us

Written by David Lyreskog

Four images depicting ‘Hivemind Brain-Computer Interfaces’, as imagined by the AI art generator Midjourney.
‘Hivemind Brain-Computer Interfaces’, as imagined by the AI art generator Midjourney

 

A growing number of technologies are currently being developed to improve and distribute thinking and decision-making. Rapid progress in brain-to-brain interfacing, and hybrid and artificial intelligence, promises to transform how we think about collective and collaborative cognitive tasks. With implementations ranging from research to entertainment, and from therapeutics to military applications, as these tools continue to improve, we need to anticipate and monitor their impacts – how they may affect our society, but also how they may reshape our fundamental understanding of agency, responsibility, and other concepts which ground our moral landscapes.Read More »How Brain-to-Brain Interfaces Will Make Things Difficult for Us