AUTHOR
Thomas Blake, Bernd Carsten Stahl and N.B. Fairweather

ABSTRACT

Artificial agents, from unembodied web bots to robots, are becoming a real part of our world. In time, we may be able to create beings with human-level intelligence. As with any agent that can act upon the world, we should expect such beings to act well. But how can we expect good behavior from such an alien being? The Singularity Institute has proposed the concept of “friendly AI” to answer this question. I will show that their analysis of the issue is insufficient and propose another approach to creating ethical intelligent artificial agents.

The Singularity Institute wrote Creating Friendly AI (CFAI) based on the concepts from General Intelligence and Seed AI (GISAI). The goal of GISAI was to describe, in the abstract, how to create an artificial general intelligence, bearing in mind the failures of past attempts at AI. In general, the method adopted by GISAI was to create a “seed AI”, a mind which may not have human intelligence but instead has the ability to improve itself. Such an AI would be able to gradually reach human intelligence (and better-than-human intelligence) by way of small self-improvements.

CFAI is an attempt to determine how to ensure that a seed AI treats us well. According to the Singularity Institute, there is little reason for us to assume that an AI would share our values and goals. Our values and goals come largely from our evolutionary history, and a being that does not share that history should not be expected to share those goals. CFAI suggests that engineers who create AI should attempt to imbue them with ethics.

CFAI advocates making “friendly” AI, beings whose goals and values include, for instance, being sympathetic towards humanity. However, this approach will not work either. An AI that can change its own programming might pursue some of its goals and values by changing others. If this is truly an alien being, then many of its goals and values might conflict with artificially inserted directives like “feel sympathetic towards humanity”. When this happens, the goals which do not mesh with the AI’s nature are likely to be the first to go.

As I have argued elsewhere, ones values come from ones nature. If Robby the Robot has a nature that is alien to us, we should not expect what is good for Robby to be good for us. If we want Robby to behave “ethically”, that is to behave in a way that would be good for a human, then we must ensure that Robby’s nature necessitates an ethics that is in line with ours. If we want Robby to respect and protect humans, then Robby should be a social being that we treat as an equal.

It follows that we should attempt to create artificial agents with a nature similar to ours. Then, an ethics like ours would follow from its nature, and the artificial agent should have no more trouble being good than we do. Of course, this is no guarantee that our creations will be good, but we shouldn’t expect more of ourselves than we do of God.

REFERENCES

Blake, Thomas. “Technological Transcendence: Why It’s Okay that the Future Doesn’t Need Us”. Proceedings of ETHICOMP2007, Tokyo, Japan.

Singularity Institute (orig. Eliezer Yudkowsky). “Creating Friendly AI”. online at http://www.singinst.org/upload/CFAI/

Singularity Institute (orig. Eliezer Yudkowsky). “General Intelligence and Seed AI”. online at http://www.singinst.org/ourresearch/publications/GISAI/

AUTHOR
Barbara Begier

ABSTRACT

Users’ involvement in a software process is recommended to respect ethical and social values and to provide software quality from the user’s point of view. The questionnaire survey is reported ? its aim was to get learn what threats associated with an informatization on a large scale are pointed out by students of an engineering faculty. Many of threats may be eliminated by user’s involvement in a software process. Just agile methodologies help respecting social values and producing software products adapted to users’ expectations. Several additional primary and supporting processes are required in a software life cycle focused on a cooperation with users. Software product assessment ensures an external feedback from users.

There is still a challenge to balance agility and discipline. The dominating process-oriented hard methodologies were born in a military context. Quality is there related to rigorous plans and detailed definitions of processes. But the introduced procedures, including those recommended in the CMMI, do not guarantee quality of the product. Software developers usually act in an isolation from software users. Involved experts try to show their own usefulness and recommend new procedures and metrics. Hard methodologies are reported as successful in armaments production, aircraft industry (Boeing, Lockheed Martin) and in the branch of computing and telecommunication (Motorola), all counted to the military area ? in the conference SEPG (Software Engineering Process Group) in 2005 the armament sector was represented also by: Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Motorola, Siemens. Unfortunately, hard methodologies often fail in software production for social applications.

The reported questionnaire survey shows various threats associated with an informatization on a large scale. The questionnaire items were divided into three groups related to the individual, country-wide, and global threats. The obtained results are presented in three tables attached to the conference paper. In engineering students’ opinions the health condition of individuals spending all day long at the computer screen seems to be the most threatened item in the respondents’ opinion. Lack of privacy including lack of human control concerning data security in information systems holds a leading position among threats on the country-wide and on the global scale.

One of strategies to improve software quality is to provide a continual feedback from users on a software product, especially an expert system and that produced by making use of public funds. The required feedback should not be limited to specify requirements. Users’ involvement is one of principles shared in agile approaches, in response to bureaucratic and unsuccessful methods in software production. Agile methodologies are product-oriented and seem to be the emerging ones. Several methodologies have been developed to encourage software community to customer-developer collaboration, to combine humans and technology, and to prepare participants for collaboration. An assumption underlying any agile methodology concerns granularity of a software product ? it determines small iterations in software development.

The author’s research shows that a cooperation with users may have, at least, the form of a software product assessment by a wide spectrum of its users. An instrument to assess software quality and provide an external loop of the required feedback is a questionnaire survey of at least several dozen of users. Required software improvements are specified on the base of an analysis of the obtained results. Several experiments with software quality assessment by their direct users have been performed and reported. Besides an external loop of the feedback there are also several internal loops provided in each development cycle by an active involvement of users’ representatives in various working teams, meetings, brain storm sessions, test design and supervision, software inspections (where users play roles of coauthors of control lists of software inspections), etc.

Agile methodologies should be promoted among software developers. The main idea emphasized here is to make users the subject of a software process to build high quality software products. A cooperation with users helps to consider ethical and social aspects of software applications and makes possible to learn users’ point of view and to improve a product according to users’ notes and expectations. The objectives of the software process in such approach are listed in the conference paper. The desired user’s high satisfaction from a product means that all realized processes are in fact (not declaratively only) focused on that goal. Conventional phases in software development no longer make sense. Several additional processes and also additional phases in a software life cycle are introduced to provide the required continual feedback from users. Agile methodologies and ethical aspects in computing need a special attention and should be incorporated in an educational process of future software engineers.

AUTHOR
Porfirio Barroso, Lucía Tello and Adelaide Marin

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this investigation, focuses on the different concepts of plagiarism that we use now and have been using trough history, starting from its etymologic origin to the new concepts plagiarism stand for with the arrival of personal computers and Internet. We intend to show how plagiarism has lived among men/women ever since its existence, even though her evolution is logic, this phenomenon kept its essentialities of the act. Trough this thesis we will make a comparison of plagiarism since ancient times up till the influences of New Information and Communication Technologies.

The purpose is to create, in the mind of the receptor, criteria’s of free opinion about how plagiarism exposes the principal arguments in favor and against this phenomenon. On the other hand, we would like to give acknowledgement about how plagiarism handles in different scopes like the artistically, architectural, literature, and to distinguish from this century, the technological and informational scope.

The conceptual study is being developed from a chronological point of view: plagiarism trough time. We put the different forms forward in which plagiarism transformed itself since the assumed religious origins of the ancient epoch, trough the scientific improvements of Modern Times, to end with the new technological discoveries that preoccupy the present.

An analysis of the concept mentioned above, is also carried out from a legal, doctrinal and ethical point of view, which is the balance on which this investigation is based. The terminology plagiarism can consist of two meanings that have been used and are still used in history. The first meaning refers to the fraudulent copy without authors’ rights. The second meaning of plagiarism is used in a lot of publications as a synonym for the abduction of people.

The different mediums, in digital or printed format, that have been sources to obtain information for this investigation, were in principal social theses written by authors such as Virgilio Balbuena; laws and directives of the European Union, such as the Treaty of OMPI about authors’ rights (WCT) and the Convention of Berna for the protection of Literary and Artistic Works. The different examples used in the investigation are part of the collective cultural memory. After the analysis and examination of these sources, it was concluded that plagiarism lasts until the end of humanity . It was shown that this phenomenon is typical for human beings, in religious aspects (God created man to his image and resemblance), as well as in physiological and scientific aspects (DNA that duplicates, plagiarizes itself to reproduce mankind). Moreover, learning by imitation is also a point of discussion. In this case, plagiarism is the main instrument for man to develop his cognitive capabilities.

Human beings have learned to live with plagiarism, knowing how to distinguish the good or bad behavior in daily and professional life. We can discern between legal an ethical aspects of the plagiarism. From the point of view of law, each country has its own regulation about the plagiarism. However, from the point of view of Ethics, according to the Internet Codes of Ethics, we have consulted, all kind of plagiarism is unethical. On the other hand, we undestand that mere copying is when the authors give permission for copying, or is an authorized copy.

There are a lot of arguments for and against this phenomenon. The detractors of plagiarism refer to fraudulent copies that work against public interest and fundamental rights by misleading the consumer in the displacement of the pieces of work and their authors, losing the spirit and originality of the first creator. From another point of view, the defenders of plagiarism proclaim that the copy is their own possession. This is how they acquire the status of martyr by reducing their own originality and to accept the responsibility to have internalized the essence of the work. This duality forms an obstacle to create laws and regularization, because this concept includes morality and ethical issues.

Despite the foundation of acts like copyright and domestic rules from the European Union like intellectual property and author rights, plagiarism is still one of the most international problem for the new technology. Since the foundation of the printing till the recent new computers unlimited forms of plagiarism exist. Nowadays not controlling plagiarism has great consequences in sectors like economy, art and information. The main cause: Internet.

The limitations that makes the investigation process impossible have a mainly literal and legislative character. There is a legal blank as well in the communitarian law as in the laws of the government and those laws that are only capable of being effective to prevent plagiarism. There is also little investigation in this phenomenon, that is why there is not many literature about it. The texts that handles about the subject abuse the general opinion and don’t give good arguments to start an objective investigation. The sense of this text is established in the fact about whether it is the original work or not like a similar investigation. It is a copy of different consulted sources. In this case the reader already knows how plagiarism is produced because he knows the source. And like this, they found themselves obligated to take part of one of the positions already bared.

The examined work presents itself as a text that analyses different relation subjects like History, Humanity, Ethics and plagiarism.

AUTHOR
Giampaolo Azzoni

ABSTRACT

In order to develop the civil and economic potential of social media, not only operators, but also governments and international institutions, should operate towards the construction of a blogosphere conceived as a spontaneous order (in the sense of Hayek), an open society (in the sense of Popper) and a plural space of public opinion (in the sense of Habermas). Social effectiveness of a social medium is narrowly linked to the capacity to abandon a monologic and narcissistic dimension and attain a dialogical and relational form. Social media operators (especially professional operators) are invited to elaborate not only codes of conduct, but even structures of social media from a point of view which is inter-subjective, dialectic and ethically engaged (in the sense of Hegel).

AUTHOR
Eliany Alvarenga Araujo, Marcos Antonio Alexandre Bezerra

ABSTRACT

The information technology and digital communication, present in our globalized society – The Information Society – come imposing new challenge for the reflections in the several areas of knowledge. A new system of communication that speaks a language with more and more universal character, through digital processes, stimulates either the global interaction of production and distribution of words, sounds and images as it personalizes them according to the preferences, identities, uses and gratifications of the individuals. We are talking about a singular environment; a new social-cultural scenery where the social acts happen with dynamic and inedited formats: the Internet. This environment – named cyberspace – challenges the studious of the social questions to create new theoretical tools that take care of these new phenomena of social interaction. The internet flows at a speed and in quantities not imagined only a few years ago, assuming fundamental economic values and, at the same time, provoking ethic conflicts and consequent necessity of new reflections. Although some studies contribute to launch lights about this virtual reality, the virtual social nets are still a field that still needs deeper reflections. Thus, in this environment we have the challenge of reflecting about ethic questions, which are unsociably connected to the social phenomena, intrinsically connected to the human being. In this sense, this study aims to reflect about the Orkut, a virtual social net linked to the Google, created on January 19th 2004, with the objective of helping its members to create new friendships and keep relationships. Its name is derived from the chief designer, Orkut Büyükkokten, Turkish engineer from Google. At the moment, the Orkut has all over the world, more than 80 million enrolled users, which establish links of professional and personal relationship. The term ethics talks deals with a phenomena of social existence that was born with the humanity, from the moment the man gets conscious of him with the other. The ethics, this way, is related to the initial moment of the human being in the exercise of realizing himself and feeling himself towards the other being that is similar. This conscious of being and to be among equals requires the formulation of principles that preserve the individuality and its integrity in the collective, conceiving to everyone of the same origin as being equals in the relation with the world. If the fundamental function of the ethics is to explain, clarify or investigate a determined reality, elaborating the corresponding concepts, we intend to reflect about the Orkut as an informational phenomenon. As long as we are talking of a phenomenon that uses the information flows and that requires an ethic reflection, we will use the concept of the ethic of the information, proposed by the thinker Rafael Capurro. According to this thinker, the ethics of information designs questions related to the ambit of the processing and by the transmission of information, as well as the management of this information. From an ethics of information as an emancipatory theory we will try to reflect about the liberty of expression and access which the individuals in the context Orkut use. This way we ask: Would it be possible we think in an ethics that investigated, explained or clarified this virtual reality, as a “new” form of experience or human behavior, base don the information mode, based on the information phenomena as a re(connection) element? To do this reflection, we are going to focus the category sociability. The concept sociability was proposed by Georg Simmel. For this thinker the sociability is related to the perspective that the social is a group of relations. The social totality (being “society”, “group” or “community”) is constituted by a relational total, result of a group of relations that the parts which compose it establish dynamically each moment. From this comprehension of the social, there would be only the individual in the society and society in the individual. Society and individual build reciprocally. To Simmel the individuals meet, in the crossing points of the social circles, establishing interdependent relations. From these considerations we ask: In the context of the Orkut the concept of sociability proposed by Simmel could really be applied? The social relations that occur then are analogical reproductions of the ones already existent and in action in the society (sociability)? On the other hand, we can also consider that the subjects (social actors) that are part of the Orkut are establishing a new form of interaction, is this, a new sociability that is not based on the laces of social construction, but in a “Narcisic” sociability, based uniquely on its wishes? Could we consider that in the Orkut we would have a non-sociability? If this consideration is possible, we must reflect about the consequences of such configuration for the human living. We are impelled for these questions to reflect this moment that takes away the point and that requires a new look.

AUTHOR
Francesca Arcelli Fontana, Ferrante Formato and Remo Pareschi

ABSTRACT

The Web is the most important information framework of our generation and probably the next and the Semantic Web is a project to make the Web fully “understandable”. At the current stage it stays very much a “project” shared by academic institutions and research centers. On the other hand, the primeval Web (so called Web 1.0) has evolved on its own into something completely different, Web 2.0. Without getting into a protracted argument over the exact definition of “Web 2.0”, there is a general consensus that it is all about people: it doesn’t care only about technology or standards, just make sure that it is people-oriented by letting and enabling people create, collaborate, share and interact. More than that, and curiously enough, the Web 2.0 has boosted a thoroughly unexpected concept muted by biology and complex systems : co-evolution. In fact, while the nitty gritty of Semantic Web -ontologies and RDFs- still fight their way through the niche of academic and educational institutions, the hottest sites of the Network are no longer mere content containers, but lively Web communities that live their metamorphosis within global social networks like MySpace.

Complex networks are everywhere, from molecular aggregation of amynoacids to telephonic networks and motorways. It seems that complex networks are necessary characteristics of life itself, in the sense that without a complex network no form of life can be developed. One of the most bewildering things is that complex networks are never alone. For any complex network, there is another complex network somewhere that creates it, reflects it and co-evolves with it. For example the thought is a (complex) networks of concepts reflected into a (complex) aggregation of communities of neurons that reflects upon a (complex) community of people. But the most amusing thing is that the converse is difficult to deny. Therefore, any explicit specification of knowledge -according to Tom Gruber’s definition of ontology- to make sense must reflect an explicit distribution of minds that share such knowledge. As a consequence, the Web graph is the reflection of a social network which in turn is the reflection of a complex cognitive map. Thus, although the quest for semantic clarity remains high, the context and the scope of a “Semantic Web” has dramatically changed. Knowledge is no longer poured from heaven into ontologies but is negotiated through Web communities. In fact, our assumption here is that the relationship between conceptual networks (ontologies) and people networks (Web communities) is reciprocal and dynamic: ontologies identify communities and communities, through their practices and interests, define ontologies and determine their evolution. By applying proven constraints techniques for querying conceptual languages in the style of KLONE and coupling them with community detection algorithms from the tradition of complex networks, in this paper we want to show, given an ontology, how to extract a set of Web communities by matching each part of the ontology with the kernel of Web community. Furthermore, we will propose an extension of the layer cake road map for the Semantic Web, that keeps into account the relationship between people and content underlying the evolutionary step from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.