Existence, really? Tacit disagreements about “existence” in disputes about group minds and corporate agents

Himmelreich, Johannes

doi:10.1007/s11229-019-02379-3

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 37 publications

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“…It may open a dilemma, the objector could contend, where either we must give up the extension of X to the institutions if we are demanding this be done with AI technology, or we should be prepared to extend X to the technology. Our response is to remind the objector that X is a stand in for agentially loaded notions, notions that we paradigmatically ascribe to agents, and to point out that there is a rich literature defending collective agency (French, 1984;List & Pettit, 2011;Hess, 2014;Tollefsen, 2015;Björnsson & Hess, 2016;Himmelreich, 2019b). 6 Institutions such as corporations are often given as precise examples of such collective agents.…”

Section: What We Need Ai Technologies To Be: Reliable Safe Explainabl...mentioning

confidence: 99%

No Agent in the Machine: Being Trustworthy and Responsible about AI

Conradie,

Nagel

2024

Philos. Technol.

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Many recent AI policies have been structured under labels that follow a particular trend: national or international guidelines, policies or regulations, such as the EU’s and USA’s ‘Trustworthy AI’ and China’s and India’s adoption of ‘Responsible AI’, use a label that follows the recipe of [agentially loaded notion + ‘AI’]. A result of this branding, even if implicit, is to encourage the application by laypeople of these agentially loaded notions to the AI technologies themselves. Yet, these notions are appropriate only when applied to agents, which current AI technologies are not; and the concern is that this misapplication creates an incentive to inappropriately attribute trustworthiness or responsibility to AI technologies. We endeavour to show that we have good reason to avoid any general AI policy that uses agentially loaded labelling. We suggest labelling these policies not in terms of some qualification of AI, but rather in terms of our approach to the technology and its wider development and use context – focusing on being trustworthy and responsible about AI, rather than on trustworthy or responsible AI.

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Section: What We Need Ai Technologies To Be: Reliable Safe Explainabl...mentioning

confidence: 99%

No Agent in the Machine: Being Trustworthy and Responsible about AI

Conradie,

Nagel

2024

Philos. Technol.

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Autonomous Military Systems: collective responsibility and distributed burdens

Conradie

2023

Ethics Inf Technol

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The introduction of Autonomous Military Systems (AMS) onto contemporary battlefields raises concerns that they will bring with them the possibility of a techno-responsibility gap, leaving insecurity about how to attribute responsibility in scenarios involving these systems. In this work I approach this problem in the domain of applied ethics with foundational conceptual work on autonomy and responsibility. I argue that concerns over the use of AMS can be assuaged by recognising the richly interrelated context in which these systems will most likely be deployed. This will allow us to move beyond the solely individualist understandings of responsibility at work in most treatments of these cases, toward one that includes collective responsibility. This allows us to attribute collective responsibility to the collectives of which the AMS form a part, and to account for the distribution of burdens that follows from this attribution. I argue that this expansion of our responsibility practices will close at least some otherwise intractable techno-responsibility gaps.

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The meta-metaphysics of group beliefs: in search of alternatives

Posłajko

2023

Synthese

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The aim of this paper is to argue that our understanding of the issue of institutional group minds might be broadened if we consider alternative meta-metaphysical frameworks to those which are presently presupposed in the field. I argue that the two major camps in the contemporary philosophical debate about group beliefs, namely strong realism and eliminative reductionism, share a commitment to some form of meta-philosophical realism. Two alternative metaontological frameworks for the discussion of the issue of group belief are outlined: fictionalism and deflationism. Fictionalism about group minds, although unpopular in the philosophical debate, is still a much-discussed option in legal theory and the theory of the firm in economics. I argue that, once formulated properly, the fictionalist position deserves serious consideration. The other alternative option is deflationism: I develop a sketch of the deflationary approach to group beliefs that is based on Thomasson’s approach to the existence of groups. The final parts of the paper are devoted to a discussion of the resulting four-element classification of the possible views on the reality of group minds: realism, eliminative reductionism, fictionalism, and deflationism. I offer some proposals with regard to the criteria that might be used to choose between these theories.

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Existence, really? Tacit disagreements about “existence” in disputes about group minds and corporate agents

Cited by 3 publications

References 37 publications

No Agent in the Machine: Being Trustworthy and Responsible about AI

No Agent in the Machine: Being Trustworthy and Responsible about AI

Autonomous Military Systems: collective responsibility and distributed burdens

The meta-metaphysics of group beliefs: in search of alternatives

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