Jean-Pierre Dupuy

Some Pitfalls in the Philosophical Foundations of Nanoethics

If such a thing as nanoethics is possible, it can only develop by confronting the great questions of moral philosophy, thus avoiding the pitfalls so common to regional ethics. We identify and analyze some of these pitfalls: the restriction of ethics to prudence understood as rational risk management; the reduction of ethics to cost/benefit analysis; the confusion of technique with technology and of human nature with the human condition. Once these points have been clarified, it is possible to take up some weighty philosophical and metaphysical questions which are not new, but which need to be raised anew with respect to nanotechnologies: the artificialization of nature; the question of limits; the role of religion; the finiteness of the human condition as something with a beginning and an end; the relationship between knowledge and know-how; the foundations of ethics.

Common knowledge, common sense

The notion of «common knowledge», which will be at the center of the present discussion, first made its appearance in the «philosophy of mind» (an Anglo-American specialty), and was initially conceptualized within the framework of formal game theory. It strikes me as being obvious that there are many connections between this vein of work and some of the most typical themes in contemporary French philosophy

Acknowledging AI's dark side.

The 17 July special section on Artificial Intelligence (AI) (p. [248][1]), although replete with solid information and ethical concern, was biased toward optimism about the technology. The articles concentrated on the roles that the military and government play in “advancing” AI, but did not include the opinions of any political scientists or technology policy scholars trained to think about the unintended (and negative) consequences of governmental steering of technology. The interview with Stuart Russell touches on these concerns (“Fears of an AI pioneer,” J. Bohannon, News, p. [252][2]), but as a computer scientist, his solutions focus on improved training. Yet even the best training will not protect against market or military incentives to stay ahead of competitors. Likewise double-edged was M. I. Jordan and T. M. Mitchells desire “that society begin now to consider how to maximize” the benefits of AI as a transformative technology (“Machine learning: Trends, perspectives, and prospects,” Reviews, p. [255][3]). Given the grievous shortcomings of national governance and the even weaker capacities of the international system, it is dangerous to invest heavily in AI without political processes in place that allow those who support and oppose the technology to engage in a fair debate. The section implied that we are all engaged in a common endeavor, when in fact AI is dominated by a relative handful of mostly male, mostly white and east Asian, mostly young, mostly affluent, highly educated technoscientists and entrepreneurs and their affluent customers. A majority of humanity is on the outside looking in, and it is past time for those working on AI to be frank about it. The rhetoric was also loaded with positive terms. AI presents a risk of real harm, and any serious analysis of its potential future would do well to unflinchingly acknowledge that fact. The question posed in the collections introduction—“How will we ensure that the rise of the machines is entirely under human control?” (“Rise of the machines,” J. Stajic et al. , p. [248][1])—is the wrong question to ask. There are no institutions adequate to “ensure” it. There are no procedures by which all humans can take part in the decision process. The more important question is this: Should we slow the pace of AI research and applications until a majority of people, representing the worlds diversity, can play a meaningful role in the deliberations? Until that question is part of the debate, there is no debate worth having. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.349.6245.248 [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.349.6245.252 [3]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aaa8415

TWO TEMPORALITIES, TWO RATIONALITIES: A NEW LOOK AT NEWCOMB'S PARADOX

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the rationality and reversibility of time. Intuitively, it seems that economists operate with a type of time that flows in the opposite direction from that in which phenomena actually occur. The chapter also discusses the extent to which this intuition can be given a precise formulation and a sound foundation. The rational actor of economic theory is guided by his ends and reasons in regressive fashion, from the future toward the present. Estimating the impact that the consequences of his actions will have on the ends that he is pursuing, he works backward from the desired consequences to the actions that produce them. This temporality, the temporality of projects and of rational decisions, does indeed seem to run against the current when compared to the flow of phenomena. One manifestation of this reverse motion is the temporally retrograde character of much of the reasoning employed in rational choice theory, strategic or not.

Anatomy of 9/11: Evil, Rationalism, and the Sacred

1. The Expulsion of Evil in the Rationalist Model and in Critical Sociology Though the terrorists of September 11th, 2001 succeeded in bringing down the towers that symbolized the power of world capitalism, they did not succeed in undermining the way we interpret human acts, including those that appear the most nonsensical. The individualistic and rationalistic model that currently dominates the field of the social sciences—and even the common sense attitude— urges us to account or give reasons for the actions of the other, but also for our own actions, by looking for their causes and by considering these causes as reasons.2 If John did x, it is because he desired to obtain y, and because he believed he would obtain y by doing x. Every action, even the most seemingly nonsensical, appears to be endowed with a minimal rationality, as long as one conceives it as being motivated by desires and beliefs. All that is required is to find the appropriate desires and beliefs, those that will enable us to reconstruct the puzzle. And we have certainly seen reasonable people attribute the most fantastic beliefs to others (beliefs they themselves would be incapable of forming), pretending to believe in their reality by calling them “religious beliefs”! In order to preserve the explanatory schema that assimilates reasons and causes for action, the rationalists will hold, in the case of a nonsensical action, that the actors believe nonsensically. This view is clearly the result of inadequate analysis and a lack of imagination—as if religious beliefs were powerful enough to be the cause of such acts! Thinkers have sought to give meaning to nonsensical acts through the alterity of “absurd” religious beliefs. This paradox deserves some reflection. In order to preserve the rationality of an act of incredible violence or madness, we must lend beliefs (or sometimes desires) to their authors—beliefs that any sensible person would reject with horror, ridicule or commiseration.3 In fact, such a model for interpreting human actions has nothing to say about the rationality of beliefs and desires, for they are considered as given facts. According to the famous dictum of David Hume, “Reason is, and must be, the slave of the passions.” If there

Medicine and Power

‘Medicine and Power’: if there is one thinker who placed the relations between power and life at the heart of his work, and who therefore had to conceptualise medicine as knowledge and as power over life, it is undeniably Michel Foucault: ‘Power is everywhere, it arises at every moment, in every point, or rather in every relation between one point and another,’ we are told in La Volonté de savoir [1 ]. To understand these lines, one must recall that Foucault intends here to mark his difference to Marxism. Foucault rejects the Marxist conception of domination at two levels. First of all, he rejects the notion that there exists a power relation, an ‘overall binary opposition between dominators and dominated. [...] We are everywhere in a struggle [...] and, at each instant, we go from rebellion to domination, from domination to rebellion, and it is all this perpetual agitation that I want to try to make visible,’ Foucault [2 , p. 216] explained in his classes at the Collège de France, in the early seventies. And again: ‘Power is not omnipotent or omniscient, on the contrary [...] If we have witnessed the develReceived: November 11, 2003

Cybernetics Is an Antihumanism. Technoscience and the Rebellion Against the Human Condition

There is no science that does not rest on a metaphysics, though typically it remains concealed. It is the responsibility of the philosopher to uncover this metaphysics, and then to subject it to criticism. What I have tried to show is that cybernetics, far from being the apotheosis of Cartesian humanism, as Heidegger supposed, actually represented a crucial moment in its demystification, and indeed in its deconstruction.

Note on Philip Ball‘s Article: The Physical Modelling of Human Social Systems

In conclusion of his excellent survey of physics-based models of human and social behaviour, and after showing that many of these models account for observed behaviour better than the models used in the conventional social sciences (often based on the rationality assumption), Philip Ball anticipates that those who believe in free will will be shocked by this result. He then tries to persuade them: our choices are rarely free, people infl uence each other a lot, and physics-based models are precisely one of the best ways to formalize mutual infl uence. Right, people infl uence each other a lot. However, the problem with these models as I see it is not that they have mutual infl uences override the limited freedom of choice that agents can have. The problem is that they treat social infl uence in a trivial way. True, people infl uence each other a lot, but not at all in the same way as neighbouring electron spins infl uence each other. And the implications of that Published online: November 26, 2004 ComPlexUs

Choosing to Intend, Deciding to Believe

According to a number of distinguished authors, prominent among them Jonathan Cohen (1992), it would be useful or even necessary, if one is to clear up a series of puzzles in philosophy of mind, to draw a radical distinction between two kinds of mental states: belief and acceptance. The former would be involuntary, the latter voluntary or intentional. Belief would aim at truth, acceptance at success or utility. Belief would be passive, because shaped by evidence; acceptance, active and one could, for the sake of pragmatic concerns, accept something even if one doesn’t believe it. Belief would be context-independent; acceptance, context-dependent. Belief would be a matter of degrees, acceptance an all-or-nothing matter.