Title
Engineering Responsibility in the Age of AI: Amelioration or Preservation?
Abstract
Responsibility gaps arise when harm is caused by autonomous systems and we are unable to appropriately assign moral responsibility for that harm. This occurs because (i) no human being can be held accountable given the autonomous nature of the system that created the harm; and (ii) the system itself lacks the relevant features to be considered a responsible agent. Neither the humans who developed and deployed the system nor the machines themselves are responsible. Hence, the gap arises: there is no one to be held responsible for the harm, yet (unlike cases of natural disasters) we have the intuition that someone should be responsible. In this paper, we tap into the literature on conceptual engineering to explore two strategies regarding this issue. On the one hand, we can identify the risks of gaps and attempt to ameliorate the concept in the hope of removing them. On the other hand, we can highlight the risks of conceptual revision and aim to preserve our current concept as it is. We argue that conceptual preservation is an underutilized yet promising strategy in the case of AI-enabled responsibility gaps, and show how its theoretical upsides play out in practice.
About Fabio
Fabio is a philosopher specializing in the interplay between technology, ethics of artificial intelligence, moral responsibility, and free will.
Since completing his PhD at Bielefeld in 2023, Fabio has been working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh.
About Enrico
Enrico’s research interests include Early Modern Philosophy (esp. British Moralists), Virtue Ethics, Enlightenment Studies, Ethics, and its History.
He holds a Ph.D. from the University of St Andrews (Scotland). For the 2022 Fall term, he was a visiting doctoral researcher at NYU. He has also spent time as a DAAD research fellow at the University of Mainz, the Göttingen Institute of Advanced Study and the University of Cologne.