Abstract
There is a deluge of AI-assisted decision-making systems, where our data serve as proxy to our actions, suggested by AI. The closer we investigate our data (raw input, or their learned representations, or the suggested actions), we begin to discover “bugs”. Outside of their test, controlled environments, AI systems may encounter situations investigated primarily by those in other disciplines, but experts in those fields are typically excluded from the design process and are only invited to attest to the ethical features of the resulting system or to comment on demonstrations of intelligence and aspects of craftmanship after the fact. This communicative impasse must be overcome. Our idea is that philosophical and engineering considerations interact and can be fruitfully combined in the AI design process from the very beginning. We embody this idea in the role of a philosopher engineer. We discuss the role of philosopher engineers in the three main design stages of an AI system: deployment management (what is the system’s intended use, in what environment?); objective setting (what should the system be trained to do, and how?); and training (what model should be used, and why?). We then exemplify the need for philosopher engineers with an illustrative example, investigating how the future decisions of an AI-based hiring system can be fairer than those contained in the biased input data on which it is trained; and we briefly sketch the kind of interdisciplinary education that we envision will help to bring about better AI.
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E. Musk, CEO of Tesla, changed his title to “technoking” (BBC News; March 15, 2021).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Christo Wilson, Dimitrios Mylonas, Fintan Nagle and Sachi Arafat for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this work, to NCH at Northeastern for support through its RLDI grant scheme, and to the Trans-Atlantic Information Ethics co-investigator Ron Sandler.
Funding
This article was supported by a New College of the Humanities (NCH) at Northeastern Research and Learning Development Initiative (RLDI) grant on Trans-Atlantic Information Ethics, with co-investigators Brian Ball and Ron Sandler as project leads.
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Ball, B., Koliousis, A. Training philosopher engineers for better AI. AI & Soc 38, 861–868 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01535-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01535-7