Date: March 1st (Friday), 4:00 PM (Warsaw time)
Join us online via Zoom: https://uw-edu-pl.zoom.us/my/hill.meetings
Title: Designing Autonomous Tools: Technical and Ethical Challenges
Abstract:
Human beings share with other species an inherent capacity for tool making, the capacity to devise and give form to entities whose functioning responds to the problems posed by their being in the world. However, contrary to other species, in human beings this capacity for toolmaking has been evolving, benefiting from an effect of experience accumulation and knowledge transfer throughout generations, in a process that is inherently human (Ferreira, 2022). Artifacts, particularly tools, have consequently evolved defining an historical timeline that can also be seen as contextually determined.
Tools were primarily body extensions powered by human muscles and even later, first with the introduction of the steam engine and afterwards with the introduction of electricity, tools depended on human action to operate them. In the second half of the 20th century the revolution brought about by ICT technologies and their developments has allowed the creation of tools that have gained autonomy and no longer depend on humans for their functioning. Digital tools, namely AI powered systems, can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments. https://legalinstruments.oecd.org/en/instruments/OECD-LEGAL-0449
AI systems are designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and even operate autonomously and without human direct intervention, thanks to an improved awareness of their environment and decision-making capabilities. These tools, the ultimate form of technological sophistication, are already part of human reality, embedded in the interfaces we interact with daily, acting in a human-like way in different settings/contexts, co-acting with human agents at the workplace, improving human performance or efficiently replacing it. They have lost their typical essential instrumental character and by gaining autonomy they have become agents on their own. This profound ontological shift (Ferreira 2022), that will ultimately lead to a distinct civilizational framework, calls for a deep ethical reflection on their impacts on individuals, on the present and future societies, on the other species and on the planet, so that dramatic changes can be anticipated, and risks and negative impacts avoided.
In this presentation we will address some of these challenges by taking a particular case study: the design of a social robot suited to interact with children in a hospital setting.
References:
AI, OECD Legal Instruments, https://legalinstruments.oecd.org/en/instruments/OECD-LEGAL-0449
Ferreira, Maria Isabel Aldinhas, (2022) On Human Condition: The Status of Work, in The 21st Century Industrial Robot: When Tools Become Collaborators, Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira and Sarah Fletcher eds. Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering. Springer
Ferreira, Maria Isabel Aldinhas, (2022) In Machines we Trust? In Towards Trustworthy Artificial Intelligent Systems Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira and Osman Tokhi eds. Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering. Springer https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-09823-9
This talk is a part of the Traincrease Lecture Series (D4.2).
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952324.
