Steven Rieber, a former philosopher who is now a program manager at Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a part of the United States government’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is heading up a new research program that might be of interest to philosophers. The program, “Rapid Explanation, Analysis, and Sourcing Online” (REASON) aims to “develop novel technologies that will enable intelligence analysts to substantially improve the evidence and reasoning in draft analytic reports.” It is seeking research teams to fund that will build systems to help “analysts discover valuable evidence, identify strengths and weaknesses in reasoning, and produce higher quality reports.” Here is some more information about the project: Intelligence analysts sort through huge amounts of often uncertain and conflicting information as they strive to answer intelligence questions. REASON will assist and enhance analysts’ work by pointing them to key pieces of evidence beyond what they have already considered and by helping them determine which alternative explanations have the strongest support.
Philosophy
Philosophy, AI, and Society (PAIS) is a listserv that aims to “connect philosophers working on AI and related digital technologies, with a particular focus on their societal dimensions.” Run by the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory Lab (MINTLab), PAIS “is open to anyone with an interest in those topics, and members can post to the list to contact other members. The goal is to help build the Philosophy, AI and Society Network, particularly to share news about events, opportunities, and research activities.” You can sign up for PAIS here. While we’re on the subject, the director of MINTLab, Seth Lazar (Australian National University) will be delivering the Tanner Lectures at Stanford next month on “AI and Human Values.” Further details here.
Apropos last week’s “We’re Not Ready for the AI on the Horizon, But People Are Trying,” here is economist and policy analyst Samuel Hammond on what the near future holds: You’ll be able to replace your face and voice with those of someone else in real time, allowing anyone to socially engineer their way into anything. Bots will slide into your DMs and have long, engaging conversations with you until it senses the best moment to send its phishing link… Relationships will fall apart when the AI lets you know, via microexpressions, that he didn’t really mean it when he said he loved you. Copyright will be as obsolete as sodomy law, as thousands of new Taylor Swift albums come into being with a single click. Public comments on new regulations will overflow with millions of cogent and entirely unique submissions that the regulator must, by law, individually read and respond to. Death-by-kamikaze drone will surpass mass shootings as the best way to enact a lurid revenge. The courts, meanwhile, will be flooded with lawsuits because who needs to pay attorney fees when your phone can file an airtight motion for you?
Jennifer Morton, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, has been selected as the winner of the 2022 Grawemeyer Award in Education. Professor Morton was recognized for the ideas put forward in her 2019 book, Moving Up without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility (Princeton University Press). The Grawemeyer Awards, administered by the University of Louisville, “pays tribute to the power of creative ideas, emphasizing the impact a single idea can have on the world.” Bestowed in several fields, each award includes a prize of $100,000. From the award announcement: The dream of achieving success by attending college is deeply flawed for some, says Morton, a first-generation college student who left Peru to attend Princeton.
Recent additions to the Heap of Links… “While I’m still on the fence about eyes, I don’t think legs, strictly speaking, exist” — the question of whether there are more eyes or legs in the world “has profound implications for our understanding of certain fundamental matters at the heart of our ongoing debates about scientific realism,” says Justin E.H.
“Even if you prefer the sexiness of radicalism or the glory of revolution: you need boring, work-a-day normal conservative philosophy.” Yesterday, J. Dmitri Gallow (Senior Research Fellow at Dianoia Institute of Philosophy) tweeted out a thread on the value of what he labels “conservative, normal philosophy.” Finding it interesting, I asked him to turn it into a brief blog post for Daily Nous, which he very kindly did. In Defense of Boring and Derivative Philosophy by J. Dmitri Gallow I often hear papers, talks, or projects dismissed as “boring” or “derivative”—contrasted with philosophy that’s “novel” or “insightful.” This dismissive attitude is usually directed at (a) work that’s conservative, rather than radical (in a sense I’ll explain below), and (b) work that’s normal, rather than revolutionary (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn). I think the dismissive attitude underestimates the value of normal conservative philosophy. Below, I’ll introduce these distinctions and defend normal conservative—and therefore, boring and derivative—philosophy.
Please use the comments section on this post to share information about 2022 Summer Programs in Philosophy for college undergraduates. If you are organizing such a program, please add a comment to this post that includes: – program name – dates – location (is it currently planned as an online event, physical event, physical event with some online participation, physical event with an online contingency plan?) – contact information – application deadline – a description of the program – link to further information Here’s an example: Colorado Summer Seminar in Philosophy: Norms and Values Dates: June 4 – June 23, 2023 Location: Boulder, Colorado Contact: David Boonin david.boonin@colorado.edu Deadline: March 1, 2023 (review of applications begins) Description: The Colorado Summer Seminar in Philosophy is intended for outstanding advanced undergraduates who are considering graduate school in philosophy. The aim is to introduce students to the atmosphere of a graduate-level seminar, giving them a chance to explore their philosophical abilities and interests before they commit to a graduate program.
Florian J. Boge, currently an interim professor for philosophy of science at Wuppertal University and a postdoc in the interdisciplinary research unit The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider, has recently obtained a €1.35 million (≈ $1.44 million) grant by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for research on the impact of artificial intelligence on scientific understanding. The project, “Scientific Understanding and Deep Neural Networks,” according to Dr. Boge, “keys in on the impressive recent successes of Deep Neural Networks within scientific applications and inquires into whether, or in what sense and to what extent, this means an advancement of prediction, classification, and pattern-recognition over scientific understanding.
How has philosophy’s role in cognate disciplines been changing? We could ask this question about philosophy and political theory, or cognitive science, or business ethics, or theoretical physics, and so on. In the following guest post, the focus is on philosophy and bioethics. Authors Vilius Dranseika, Piotr Bystranowski, and Tomasz Żuradzki (Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics, Jagiellonian University) examine the claim that philosophy’s role in bioethics is diminishing. They take a data-driven approach to the problem, looking at trends in how frequently philosophical work is cited, and how often especially philosophical topics are discussed, in bioethics literature. In addition to putting forward their view of the matter, they are seeking feedback from readers about this method and their particular application of it. Are Philosophy’s Glory Days in Bioethics Over? by Vilius Dranseika, Piotr Bystranowski, and Tomasz Żuradzki There is a familiar claim that, when compared to the early days of bioethics, the role of philosophy in bioethics has diminished. Let’s call it the Disconnection Thesis.
According to Radio Free Asia (RFA), Wu Yanan, a philosophy lecturer at Nankai University in Tianjin, China, was taken by authorities under false pretenses and confined in a psychiatric institution for supporting anti-lockdown protestors. The officials reportedly claimed that they were taking Wu to get a COVID-19 test. However, RFA reports, she had on social media “accused the university authorities of betraying the ideals of its founder Zhang Boling by clamping down on the widespread protests” by students against strict, government-imposed lockdowns. RFA reports: Wang Qiang, a person familiar with the incident, said Wu had been a vocal supporter of the “white paper” protests. “There were some spontaneous memorials activities and blank paper protests on our university campus after the Urumqi fire [a fatal lockdown fire in Xinjiang’s regional capital Urumqi whose victimes were unable to escape the blaze because they had been locked into their own apartment building] and students who took part were hauled in to ‘drink tea’,” a euphemism for being questioned by the authorities, Wang said.