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‘New Technologies’: Questions of Agency, Responsibility, and Luck: Continuity and Change
Abstract
In this wide-ranging conversation Professor Erskine details the emergence of her interest in new technologies and their impact on international ethics and politics. She explains how a research interest in the early stages of her career in the ethics and norms of war led via work on institutional moral agency to her current research on artificial intelligence. She outlines the key questions animating her work in the context of AI, robots and moral agency and moral standing. She goes on to explain how technology has become increasingly foregrounded in her work and discusses the impact of technology on International Relations.
... AI technologies are diffuse in contemporary societies. They serve as decision aids in medical (Alsuliman et al., 2020;Wilkinson et al., 2020), judicial (Angwin et al., 2016), and military contexts (Logan & Erskine, 2019); provide companionship and care (Pfadenhauer & Lehmann, 2021;Sparrow & Sparrow, 2020); and enter the home via "smart" devices such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google's Nest (Shank, Wright, Lulham, & Thurgood, 2021;Strengers & Kennedy, 2020). These hybrid socialities occupy the interdisciplinary fields of human-computer interaction, human-machine interaction, and human-AI interaction, which together reveal trends of social psychological relevance. ...
... AI technologies are diffuse in contemporary societies. They serve as decision aids in medical (Alsuliman et al., 2020;Wilkinson et al., 2020), judicial (Angwin et al., 2016), and military contexts (Logan & Erskine, 2019); provide companionship and care (Pfadenhauer & Lehmann, 2021;Sparrow & Sparrow, 2020); and enter the home via "smart" devices such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google's Nest (Shank, Wright, Lulham, & Thurgood, 2021;Strengers & Kennedy, 2020). These hybrid socialities occupy the interdisciplinary fields of human-computer interaction, human-machine interaction, and human-AI interaction, which together reveal trends of social psychological relevance. ...
Role-taking is a basic social process underpinning much of the structural social psychology paradigm—a paradigm built on empirical studies of human interaction. Yet today, our social worlds are occupied by bots, voice assistants, decision aids, and other machinic entities collectively referred to as artificial intelligence (AI). The integration of AI into daily life presents both challenges and opportunities for social psychologists. Through a vignette study, we investigate role-taking and gender in human-AI relations. Participants read a first-person narrative attributed to either a human or AI, with varied gender presentation based on a feminine or masculine first name. Participants then infer the narrator’s thoughts and feelings and report on their own emotions, producing indicators of cognitive and affective role-taking. Overall, participants score higher on role-taking measures when the narrator is human versus AI. However, gender dynamics differ between Human and AI conditions. When the text is attributed to a human, masculinized narrators elicit stronger role-taking responses than their feminized counterparts, and women participants score higher on role-taking measures than men. This aligns with prior research on gender, status, and role-taking variation. When the text is attributed to an AI, results deviate from established findings and in some cases, reverse. We supplement results with qualitative analysis from two open-ended survey questions. This first study of human-AI role-taking tests the scope of key theoretical tenets and sets a foundation for addressing group processes in a newly emergent form.
... AI technologies are diffuse in contemporary societies. They serve as decision aids in medical (Alsuliman, Humaidan, & Sliman, 2020;Wilkinson et al., 2020), judicial (Angwin, Larson, Mattu, & Kirchner, 2016) and military contexts (Logan & Erskine, 2019); provide companionship and care (Pfadenhauer & Lehmann, 2021;Sparrow & Sparrow, 2020); and enter the home via "smart" devices such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google's Nest (Shank, Wright, Lulham, & Thurgood, 2021;Strengers & Kennedy, 2020). These hybrid socialities occupy the interdisciplinary fields of human-computer interaction, human-machine interaction, and human-AI interaction, which together reveal trends of social psychological relevance. ...
Role-taking is a basic social process underpinning much of the structural social psychology paradigm-a paradigm built on empirical studies of human interaction. Yet today, our social worlds are occupied by bots, voice assistants, decision aids, and other machinic entities collectively referred to as artificial intelligence (AI). The integration of AI into daily life presents both challenges and opportunities for social psychologists. Through a vignette study, we investigate role-taking and gender in human-AI relations. Participants read a first-person narrative attributed to either a human or AI, with varied gender presentation based on a feminine or masculine first name. Participants then infer the narrator's thoughts and feelings and report on their own emotions, producing indicators of cognitive and affective role-taking. Overall, participants score higher on role-taking measures when the narrator is human versus AI. However, gender dynamics differ between Human and AI conditions. When the text is attributed to a human, masculinized narrators elicit stronger role-taking responses than their feminized counterparts, and women participants score higher on role-taking measures than men. This aligns with prior research on gender, status, and role-taking variation. When the text is attributed to an AI, results deviate from established findings and in some cases, reverse. We supplement results with qualitative analysis from two open-ended survey questions. This first study of human-AI role-taking tests the scope of key theoretical tenets and sets a foundation for addressing group processes in a newly emergent form.
As in any realm of human activity, norms are unavoidable in cyberspace. Yet cyber- space is a singularly complex setting within which to understand and try to shape norms. The problem is not simply the nature of cyberspace, although, as we will address below, acknowledging the unique characteristics of cyberspace is crucial when exploring norms in this realm. Rather, the challenge lies in the often over- looked nature of norms themselves and how their defining features render them especially difficult to decipher – and, by extension, to attempt to design – in the context of cyberspace. Norms are widely-accepted and internalised principles or codes of conduct that indicate what is deemed to be permitted, prohibited, or required of agents within a specific community. The modest aim of our chapter is to explore the challenges and potential of engaging with norms in cyberspace. By ‘engaging with norms in cyberspace’ we mean both understanding existing norms and the more prominent endeavour (prevalent in recent discussions of policies related to both cyber security and Internet governance) of what is variously described as ‘cultivating’, ‘promoting’ or ‘developing’ new norms.2 Our focus throughout most of this chapter will be on the former. Indeed, a central point of the argument that will follow is that one can- not hope to ‘cultivate’ norms in cyberspace without first understanding the existing normative landscape. In order to explore the challenges and potential of engaging with norms in cyberspace, we will take five steps. First, we will elaborate upon the definition of ‘norms’ offered above. In doing this, we will draw on influential work from within the discipline of International Relations (IR), and specifically from the multifaceted approaches labelled ‘normative IR theory’ and ‘constructivism’.3 Second, we will introduce a task that is fundamental to understanding existing norms in any realm, including cyberspace: interpreting the norms themselves. Third, we will highlight the characteristics of cyberspace that render this crucial task particularly difficult; namely, that it is a new and rapidly changing realm in which underlying values are contested and relevant agents are often difficult to identify. Fourth, we will link the difficulties of addressing norms in such a realm with the tendency to invoke what we will call ‘quasi-norms’, or merely purported norms. Fifth and finally, we will turn to the potential to engage with norms in cyberspace, regardless of obstacles, by uncovering what we will call the ‘norm of de-territorialised data’ and, in the process, demonstrating how evidence for its status as such can be uncovered in the justifications and judgements that agents in international politics offer when it is violated. Our hope is that these preliminary steps will take us some distance towards establishing a conceptual framework for speaking more coherently about norms in cyberspace.
This book offers a challenging and original normative approach to some of the most pressing practical concerns in world politics - including the contested nature of the prohibitions against torture and the targeting of civilians in the war on terror. The author's vision of 'embedded cosmopolitanism' responds to the charge that conventional cosmopolitan arguments neglect the profound importance of community and culture, particularity and passion. Bringing together insights from communitarian and feminist political thought, the author defends the idea that community membership is morally constitutive- while arguing that the communities that define us are not necessarily territorially bounded and that a moral perspective situated in them need not be parochial. The book employs this framework to explore some of the difficult moral dilemmas thrown up by contemporary warfare. Can universal principles of restraint demanded by conventional laws of war be robustly defended from a position that also acknowledges the moral force of particular ties and loyalties? By highlighting the links that exist even between warring communities, the author offers new reasons for giving a positive response- reasons that reconcile claims to local attachments and global obligations. The book provides an account of where we stand in relation to 'strangers' and 'enemies' in a diverse and divided world, and provides a theoretical framework for addressing the relationship between our moral starting point and the scope of our duties to others.
Flesh-and-blood, corporate, robotic? Moral agents of restraint and the problem of misplaced responsibility in war. Presented at the Artificial Agency and Collective Intelligence Workshop
- T Erskine