Artificial Agency and Moral Autonomy: The Quest for Artificial Wisdom
摘要
This chapter will address a very important topic in the Philosophy and Ethics of Technology, which is that of artificial mediated agency and autonomy and its moral significance and impact on human well-being. Furthermore, it will address the key question of this chapter whether artificial agency and autonomy can be extended to the notion of wisdom: if agency is mediated and distributed between humans and intelligent machines, can there also be a mediated wisdom? Although several well-known philosophers of technology, such as Luciano Floridi (The Ethics of Information. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press UK, 2013, The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press UK, 2014), Peter-Paul Verbeek (Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things. Chicago University Press, 2011, The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), Richard Heersmink (Distributed Cognition and Distributed Morality: Agency, Artifacts and Systems, Science Engineering Ethics, 23(2):431–448, 2017), to mention but a few, have researched and written on the issue of artificial moral mediation, very little research has been published on the topic of wisdom with regard to AI technology and its impact on well-being. This chapter and the book in general, sets out to address and fill that gap. According to Verbeek, “only by recognizing this interweaving of human and technologies can we take responsibility for the ways in which technologies have an impact on society and on human existence [my emphasis] – in practices of technology design, implementation, and use” (The Moral Status of Technical Artefacts. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014: Chapter 5, p. 76). However, Verbeek, Floridi and Heersmink and the other aforementioned philosophers do not refer to the important role that wisdom should play in recognising and assessing the mediated impact of technology on well-being, and it is precisely that missing inclusion of wisdom and its gap that this chapter and this book overall, intends to fill. Namely, to examine and evaluate the impact of mediated AI technologies on our well-being, in terms of our agency, autonomy, morality and most importantly, as we shall examine in Chap. 8 of this book, our dignity, through the concept of wisdom.