#biomedical ethics

At the same time. I see people proudly declaring themselves pro-abortion anti-racist anti-capitalists in one breath and in the next saying that unvaccinated COVID patients should be left to die because they brought it on themselves and other people shouldn't pay the cost (financial or human) of their wilfull idiocy, and... You do realize that there are huge numbers of people in the U.S. requiring chronic intensive, expensive treatment for preventable diseases, right? And that those disease burdens are highest in groups on the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder? Diabetes mellitus type 2, drug addiction, alcoholism, COPD, lung cancer, HIV/AIDS, STIs... Yes, it's complex and there are a lot of factors that go into developing these conditions, but personal choice is an unavoidable one, as uncomfortable as people who blame systemic factors are to admit it. No one forces you at gunpoint to start smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Your family may smoke, your friends may smoke, you may live under chronic stress with limited sources of relief, and all those predispose you towards becoming a smoker yourself -- but not everyone who lives under those circumstances smokes. There's still choice involved, and if you choose to smoke and then get lung cancer, you have, in a very real way, brought it upon yourself. Hell, you see people making the same arguments about pregnancy resulting from consensual sex -- you chose to engage in something you knew carried risks, you should suffer the consequences.

Hello Everyone. Here is my prerecorded talk for the NC State R.L. Rabb Symposium on Embedding AI in Society.

There are captions in the video already, but I've also gone ahead and C/P'd the SRT text here, as well. There were also two things I meant to mention, but failed to in the video: 1) The history of facial recognition and carceral surveillance being used against Black and Brown communities ties into work from Lundy Braun, Melissa N Stein, Seiberth et al., and myself on the medicalization and datafication of Black bodies without their consent, down through history. (Cf. Me, here: Fitting the description: historical and sociotechnical elements of facial recognition and anti-black surveillance".) 2) Not only does GPT-3 fail to write about humanities-oriented topics with respect, it still can't write about ISLAM AT ALL without writing in connotations of violence and hatred. Also I somehow forgot to describe the slide with my email address and this website? What the hell Damien. Anyway. I've embedded the content of the resource slides in the transcript, but those are by no means all of the resources on this, just the most pertinent. All of that begins below the cut.

So here’s follow up to Kell’s discussion with King George about death.

Where Kell is deeply uncomfortable with his own cultural idea of death, Rhy is okay with it, and actually the unnaturalness of his continued life bothers him a lot more than just the thought he might have died.

I’ve listened to a reasonably large number of interviews V.E. Schwab has given and one thing she brings up in a number of them, is that she frames her books, as being about outsiders in society, as compared to insiders, and in Shades of Magic Kell is one of the outsider and Rhy one of the insiders. And that’s incredibly clear here. Rhy and Kell were raised in the same faith traditions and that tradition works for Rhy and brings him comfort, while causing Kell fear and discomfort. 

And that’s something that is sort of simmering under the conflict between Rhy and Kell right now. Kell couldn’t bear for Rhy to die, but Rhy is less worried about dying than being brought back, so Rhy is stuck with this terrible gift he doesn’t want and it raises this spectre that maybe what Kell did was, ultimately, more selfish than self-less.

So now I’m going to go in a totally weird direction. I work in biomedical research so I’ve had what I’d guess is an above average level of exposure to the extent that modern medicine can go to to save someone’s life and an above average level of comfort with them. And sometimes those things are wonderful, and sometimes they’re kind of horrific, but that’s based on how and how appropriately they’re used. I have long since lost any interest in whether something is natural or not. And from that perspective I really agree more with Kell than with Rhy. I don't care if a medical treatment, or a terrifying piece of illegal magic is natural or not, that is the furthest thing from my mind.

But also speaking as a medical scientist I have been both brought up and trained to understand that the primary ethical concern, in medical treatment, is consent. You should never perform medical interventions on an unconsenting person, even if that will kill them. And its very clear that Rhy did not want this, and so, by my own ethical standards (however dubious their relevance may be) Kell is actually in the wrong here... but to further complicate it, if you come into hospital bleeding, and can’t communicate whether you want to be saved by heroic measures, the assumption will be that you’d want your life to be saved, so actually, would that make any difference. No.

Below are the slides, audio, and transcripts for my talk '"Any Sufficiently Advanced Neglect is Indistinguishable from Malice": Assumptions and Bias in Algorithmic Systems,' given at the 21st Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, back in May 2019. (Cite as: Williams, Damien P. '"Any Sufficiently Advanced Neglect is Indistinguishable from Malice": Assumptions and Bias in Algorithmic Systems;' talk given at the 21st Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology; May 2019) Now, I've got a chapter coming out about this, soon, which I can provide as a preprint draft if you ask, and can be cited as "Constructing Situated and Social Knowledge: Ethical, Sociological, and Phenomenological Factors in Technological Design," appearing in Philosophy And Engineering: Reimagining Technology And Social Progress. Guru Madhavan, Zachary Pirtle, and David Tomblin, eds. Forthcoming from Springer, 2019. But I wanted to get the words I said in this talk up onto some platforms where people can read them, as soon as possible, for a couple of reasons. First, the Current Occupants of the Oval Office have very recently taken the policy position that algorithms can't be racist, something which they've done in direct response to things like Google’s Hate Speech-Detecting AI being biased against black people, and Amazon claiming that its facial recognition can identify fear, without ever accounting for, i dunno, cultural and individual differences in fear expression? [Free vector image of a white, female-presenting person, from head to torso, with biometric facial recognition patterns on her face; incidentally, go try finding images—even illustrations—of a non-white person in a facial recognition context.] All these things taken together are what made me finally go ahead and get the transcript of that talk done, and posted, because these are events and policy decisions about which I a) have been speaking and writing for years, and b) have specific inputs and recommendations about, and which are, c) frankly wrongheaded, and outright hateful. And I want to spend time on it because I think what doesn't get through in many of our discussions is that it's not just about how Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or Algorithmic instances get trained, but the processes for how and the cultural environments in which HUMANS are increasingly taught/shown/environmentally encouraged/socialized to think is the "right way" to build and train said systems. That includes classes and instruction, it includes the institutional culture of the companies, it includes the policy landscape in which decisions about funding and get made, because that drives how people have to talk and write and think about the work they're doing, and that constrains what they will even attempt to do or even understand. All of this is cumulative, accreting into institutional epistemologies of algorithm creation. It is a structural and institutional problem. So here are the Slides:



The Audio: … [Direct Link to Mp3] And the Transcript is here below the cut:

So, as you know, back in the summer of 2017 I participated in SRI International’s Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series. This series was an eight week program of workshops the current state of the field around, the potential future paths toward, and the moral and social implications of the notion of conscious machines. To do this, we brought together a rotating cast of dozens of researchers in AI, machine learning, psychedelics research, ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, cognitive computing, neuroscience, comparative religious studies, robotics, psychology, and much more.

[Image of my name card from the Technology & Consciousness workshop series.]

We traveled from Arlington, VA, to Menlo Park, CA, to Cambridge, UK, and back, and while my primary role was that of conference co-ordinator and note-taker (that place in the intro where it says I "maintained scrupulous notes?" Think 405 pages/160,656 words of notes, taken over eight 5-day weeks of meetings), I also had three separate opportunities to present: Once on interdisciplinary perspectives on minds and mindedness; then on Daoism and Machine Consciousness; and finally on a unifying view of my thoughts across all of the sessions. In relation to this report, I would draw your attention to the following passage:

An objection to this privileging of sentience is that it is anthropomorphic "meat chauvinism": we are projecting considerations onto technology that derive from our biology. Perhaps conscious technology could have morally salient aspects distinct from sentience: the basic elements of its consciousness could be different than ours.

All of these meetings were held under the auspices of the Chatham House Rule, which meant that there were many things I couldn’t tell you about them, such as the names of the other attendees, or what exactly they said in the context of the meetings. What I was able tell you, however, was what I talked about, and I did, several times. But as of this week, I can give you even more than that.

This past Thursday, SRI released an official public report on all of the proceedings and findings from the 2017 SRI Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series, and they have told all of the participants that they can share said report as widely as they wish. Crucially, that means that I can share it with you. You can either click this link, here, or read it directly, after the cut.

[This paper was prepared for the 2019 Towards Conscious AI Systems Symposium co-located with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2019 Spring Symposium Series. Much of this work derived from my final presentation at the 2017 SRI Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series: "Science, Ethics, Epistemology, and Society: Gains for All via New Kinds of Minds".]

Abstract. This paper explores the moral, epistemological, and legal implications of multiple different definitions and formulations of human and nonhuman consciousness. Drawing upon research from race, gender, and disability studies, including the phenomenological basis for knowledge and claims to consciousness, I discuss the history of the struggles for personhood among different groups of humans, as well as nonhuman animals, and systems. In exploring the history of personhood struggles, we have a precedent for how engagements and recognition of conscious machines are likely to progress, and, more importantly, a roadmap of pitfalls to avoid. When dealing with questions of consciousness and personhood, we are ultimately dealing with questions of power and oppression as well as knowledge and ontological status—questions which require a situated and relational understanding of the stakeholders involved. To that end, I conclude with a call and outline for how to place nuance, relationality, and contextualization before and above the systematization of rules or tests, in determining or applying labels of consciousness.

Keywords: Consciousness, Machine Consciousness, Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, Bodyminds

[Overlapping images of an Octopus carrying a shell, a Mantis Shrimp on the sea floor, and a Pepper Robot]