Tag: responsibility

Responsibility Gaps: A Red Herring?

Posted on by Fabio Tollon

by Fabio Tollon

What should we do in cases where increasingly sophisticated and potentially autonomous AI-systems perform ‘actions’ that, under normal circumstances, would warrant the ascription of moral responsibility? That is, who (or what) is responsible when, for example, a self-driving car harms a pedestrian? An intuitive answer might be: Well, it is of course the company who created the car who should be held responsible! They built the car, trained the AI-system, and deployed it.

However, this answer is a bit hasty. The worry here is that the autonomous nature of certain AI-systems means that it would be unfair, unjust, or inappropriate to hold the company or any individual engineers or software developers responsible. To go back to the example of the self-driving car; it may be the case that due to the car’s ability to act outside of the control of the original developers, their responsibility would be ‘cancelled’, and it would be inappropriate to hold them responsible.

Moreover, it may be the case that the machine in question is not sufficiently autonomous or agential for it to be responsible itself. This is certainly true of all currently existing AI-systems and may be true far into the future. Thus, we have the emergence of a ‘responsibility gap’: Neither the machine nor the humans who developed it are responsible for some outcome.

In this article I want to offer some brief reflections on the ‘problem’ of responsibility gaps. Read more »



Monday, December 20, 2021

Does AI Need Free Will to be held Responsible?

Posted on by Fabio Tollon

by Fabio Tollon

We have always been a technological species. From the use of basic tools to advanced new forms of social media, we are creatures who do not just live in the world but actively seek to change it. However, we now live in a time where many believe that modern technology, especially advances driven by artificial intelligence (AI), will come to challenge our responsibility practices. Digital nudges can remind you of your mother’s birthday, ToneCheck can make sure you only write nice emails to your boss, and your smart fridge can tell you when you’ve run out of milk. The point is that our lives have always been enmeshed with technology, but our current predicament seems categorically different from anything that has come before. The technologies at our disposal today are not merely tools to various ends, but rather come to bear on our characters by importantly influencing many of our morally laden decisions and actions.

One way in which this might happen is when sufficiently autonomous technology “acts” in such a way as to challenge our usual practices of ascribing responsibility. When an AI system performs an action that results in some event that has moral significance (and where we would normally deem it appropriate to attribute moral responsibility to human agents) it seems natural that people would still have emotional responses in these situations. This is especially true if the AI is perceived as having agential characteristics. If a self-driving car harms a human being, it would be quite natural for bystanders to feel anger at the cause of the harm. However, it seems incoherent to feel angry at a chunk of metal, no matter how autonomous it might be.

Thus, we seem to have two questions here: the first is whether our responses are fitting, given the situation. The second is an empirical question of whether in fact people will behave in this way when confronted with such autonomous systems. Naturally, as a philosopher, I will try not to speculate too much with respect to the second question, and thus what I say here is mostly concerned with the first. Read more »

Monday, June 14, 2021

The Guilty and the Responsible

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing. – Hannah Arendt.

The quotation from Arendt is often thought to apply to the aftermath of the events of 1939-45, of the Nazi atrocities, especially, of course, the Holocaust. In fact, although it is fair to say it was considerations of that sort that prompted her into thinking about guilt and responsibility, she was very aware of the problematic nature of claims of collective guilt in the post war era. The question is about culpability: the way we ought to think about guilt. She rejected the idea that there is a kind of collective guilt, say of a whole nation (in 1945 the German people, and presumably their helpers in the occupied countries, of whom there were too many). We can widen the question to include Allied war crimes, which generally went unpunished. And of course, pressingly, we turn our gaze to our world and its burden of historical and ongoing crime and oppression. 

Arendt rejected collective guilt in part because it tends to blur the difference between the specific actions for which actors need to be held to account, and the vague sense that guilt is shared. Guilt here is being seen in two senses: in the legal sense  (X is guilty of a crime) and the feeling of guilt (X feels guilty). Arendt wants to separate them, partly to keep the sense that some are the actors who need to be held to account for actions but also for another important reason, which links to her more general concerns about the difference between politics and morality.

We need to distinguish between two concepts that are often associated: guilt and responsibility. The two concepts do go together, of course. We hold a person guilty of a crime if we regard them as responsible for committing it: that is why we don’t treat the mentally unfit in the same way we do people who know what they are doing is wrong. This applies to the minor and trivial as well as the unspeakably terrible. So Bob steals a bike and he is guilty of it, because he did it, knowingly. And Adolf Eichmann is guilty because he knowingly took part in the Holocaust – he is responsible for what he did. If I did neither of these things, then I am not responsible in this sense and not guilty. But can I be responsible for things I did not do? Read more »