Philippa Foot

20 results back to index

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success by Kevin Dutton

Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Madoff, business climate, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, impulse control, iterative process, John Nash: game theory, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, place-making, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game

Trolleyology Joshua Greene, a psychologist, neuroscientist, and philosopher at Harvard University, has observed how psychopaths unscramble moral dilemmas, how their brains respond inside different ethical compression chambers. As I described in my previous book, Split-Second Persuasion, he’s stumbled upon something interesting. Far from being uniform, empathy is schizophrenic. There are two distinct varieties: hot and cold. Consider, for example, the following conundrum (case 1), first proposed by the philosopher Philippa Foot: A railway trolley is hurtling down a track. In its path are five people who are trapped on the line and cannot escape. Fortunately, you can flip a switch that will divert the trolley down a fork in the track away from the five people—but at a price. There is another person trapped down that fork, and the trolley will kill them instead.

…

, and his subsequent temporary blindness are certainly compatible with such a diagnosis—as is Saul’s own mysterious, health-related allusion (2 Corinthians. 12:7–10) to a “thorn in the flesh,” a “messenger of Satan,” “to keep me from becoming conceited.” 2 Kiehl and his coauthors also included a third type of dilemma, which they termed “impersonal.” This took the form of the original version of the Trolley Problem devised by Philippa Foot (see chapter 1), in which the choice (initiated by the flick of a switch) is whether to divert a runaway train away from its present course of killing five people onto an alternate course of killing just one. 3 Of course, such shameless disregard for the practice of monogamy leads, in turn, to sexual promiscuity … and a wider propagation of genes. 4 Henry Lee Lucas was a prolific American serial killer, once described as “the greatest monster who ever lived,” whose confessions led police to the bodies of 246 victims, 189 of whom he was subsequently convicted of murdering.

…

Cohen, “An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment,” Science 293, no. 5537 (2001): 2105–08, doi:10.1126/science.1062872; Andrea L. Glenn, Adrian Raine, and R. A. Schug, “The Neural Correlates of Moral Decision-Making in Psychopathy,” Molecular Psychiatry 14 (January 2009): 5–6, doi:10.1038/mp.2008.104. 10 Consider, for example, the following conundrum (case 1) … The Trolley Problem was first proposed in this form by Philippa Foot in “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” in Virtues and Vices: And Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 11 Now consider the following variation (case 2) … See Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem,” The Monist 59, no. 2 (1976): 204–17. 12 Daniel Bartels at Columbia University and David Pizarro at Cornell … See Daniel M.

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert Skidelsky, Edward Skidelsky

banking crisis, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon credits, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, Dr. Strangelove, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Meghnad Desai, Paul Samuelson, Philippa Foot, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, union organizing, University of East Anglia, Veblen good, wage slave, wealth creators, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

And this remains true whether the pleasures in question are of the “high” or “low” variety. Then there is joy. This is a state more exalted than either pleasure or happiness yet also more elusive. Pleasure and happiness can be pursued, but one would be hard put upon to pursue joy. Joy is paradoxically congruent with suffering, hence its prominence in Christian writing. Philippa Foot mentions a Quaker woman who after much hardship and persecution spoke of her “joyous life” preaching the Word. “She did not speak of her life as a happy life,” adds Foot; “it would have been puzzling if she had.”34 And if joy is compatible with the absence of happiness and pleasure, happiness and pleasure are likewise compatible with the absence of joy.

…

Deep happiness, for instance, is characterized as such not by palpitations or tremors—the mistake made by so many high-school story writers—but by its relation to certain centrally important human goods: love, childbirth, the completion of an important piece of work. “It does not make sense,” writes Philippa Foot in her excellent discussion of the subject, to suggest that someone found deep happiness in, say, a victory in a running dispute with a neighbour over a morning newspaper or a milk bottle, however much we think of “fizzy” behaviour and elation. Whereas deep happiness and joy over the birth of a child?

…

For details, see Yew-Kwang Ng, “Happiness Surveys: Some Comparability Issues and an Exploratory Survey Based on Just Perceivable Increments,” Social Indicators Research, vol. 38, pt. 1, pp. 1–27. 31. Layard, Happiness, p. 13. 32. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, p. 247. 33. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), 6.43. 34. Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 85. 35. Ibid., p. 88. 36. Samuel Brittan, “Commentary: A Deceptive Eureka Moment,” in Johns and Ormerod, Happiness, Economics and Public Policy, p. 93. 37. Layard, Happiness, p. 23. 38. Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, God and Man (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1983), p. 16. 39.

Robot, Take the Wheel: The Road to Autonomous Cars and the Lost Art of Driving by Jason Torchinsky

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, interchangeable parts, job automation, Philippa Foot, ransomware, self-driving car, sensor fusion, side project, Tesla Model S, trolley problem, urban sprawl

This means we should probably address the trolley problem first, since almost every discussion of autonomous car ethics will bring this up, and I’ve put it off as long as I could. The trolley problem⁵³ was first “officially” stated by the British philosopher, ethicist, and hilarious-name-haver Philippa Foot in 1967. Foot’s original description of the trolley problem reads like this: Edward is the driver of a trolley, whose brakes have just failed. On the track ahead of him are five people; the banks are so steep that they will not be able to get off the track in time. The track has a spur leading off to the right, and Edward can turn the trolley onto it.

…

For what it’s worth, most studies seem to suggest that people are in favor of killing fewer people to save more people.⁵⁵ Of course, there are all kinds of ridiculous ways to complicate this, with wildly hypothetical situations, like what if there were fifty geriatric and ugly Nazis on an autonomous bus and if you want to save them you must sacrifice Jeff Goldblum and a philanthropist who wants to provide free tacos and eternal kittens to the world. Would the sheer number of lives saved be the deciding factor here? Philippa Foot herself further complicated the trolley problem with this variant: George is on a footbridge over the trolley tracks. He knows trolleys, and can see that the one approaching the bridge is out of control. On the track back of the bridge there are five people; the banks are so steep that they will not be able to get off the track in time.

Willful: How We Choose What We Do by Richard Robb

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Brexit referendum, capital asset pricing model, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, effective altruism, endowment effect, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, family office, George Akerlof, index fund, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Philippa Foot, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, Richard Thaler, search costs, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, survivorship bias, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, trolley problem, ultimatum game

Society, in deciding whether to let the government build a dam, would have to make a for-itself decision about whether the benefit of the electricity exceeds its costs to an unwilling few. Two Moral Dilemmas The distinction between purposeful and for-itself decision-making can be demonstrated by looking at two enduring moral puzzles: the merchant’s choice posed by Cicero in 44 BCE and the trolley problem posed by Philippa Foot in 1967.3 The merchant’s choice belongs in the purposeful category, where options can be evaluated, ranked, and traded. Choices in the trolley problem, however, depend ultimately on impulse—attempts to calculate the trade-offs are swamped by an individual exercise of will. Action (or inaction) is for-itself.

…

Every aspect of this debate fits into the purposeful choice framework. It’s possible to do the necessary calculations to rationally balance concern for public welfare, private gain, and ethical principles. At the opposite extreme from the merchant’s choice is the trolley problem. There are many versions of the thought experiment originally posed by Philippa Foot; in one of the most famous, five people are standing on trolley tracks with a runaway trolley car hurtling toward them. You are standing on a bridge over the tracks next to a fat man. Pushing him onto the tracks would kill him but stop the trolley and save five people.6 What might drive you to do it?

The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday by Alexander McCall Smith

British Empire, do what you love, North Sea oil, Philippa Foot, trolley problem

She drew in her breath and read quickly to the bottom; there was the signature, bold as brass: Christopher Dove. She read the letter again, more slowly this time. Dear Ms. Dalhousie, I enclose with this letter an article that I have recently completed and that I think is suitable for publication in the Review. You may be familiar, of course, with the famous Trolley Problem that Philippa Foot raised all those years ago in Virtues and Vices. I have recently given this matter considerable thought and feel that I have a new approach to propose. There are a number of other editors keen to take this piece (both here and in the United States), but I thought that I would give you first option.

…

I would flick the switch. It was perfectly simple. Unless, of course, Dove and Lettuce were among the five—She stopped herself. That was an uncharitable thought, and she realised that she should not think it. But the delicious, childish fantasy came back. “It is not so simple,” Dove continued. “Since Philippa Foot first posed the problem, a number of writers have examined it in greater detail, most notably Judith Jarvis Thomson, who changed the conditions of the thought experiment by taking out the spur line and introducing an innocent fat man. This fat man is on a bridge directly above the trolley line.

The Lost Art of Gratitude by Alexander McCall Smith

gentleman farmer, Higgs boson, Philippa Foot

Such circles wanted complexity, dysfunction and irony: there was no room for joy, celebration or pathos. But where was the fun in that? She answered his question. “We probably do. We want resolution and an ending that shows us that the world is a just place. We’ve always wanted that. We want human flourishing, as Philippa Foot would put it.” “One of your philosophers?” “Yes, Professor Philippa Foot. She wrote a book called Natural Goodness. I would offer to show it to you had I not just agreed not to burden you with philosophy.” “I like the sound of her,” said Jamie. “Professor Foot. Is she naturally good?” “I think she is,” said Isabel. “Though usually people who are naturally good have to work at it.

Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

AI winter, Air France Flight 447, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, digital map, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hive mind, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, lone genius, Lyft, megacity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philippa Foot, precision agriculture, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, warehouse robotics

When we give talks to audiences about the value and potential impact of driverless cars, inevitably someone at the back of the room will raise his hand and ask a variation of this question: “If faced with a fatal situation, how will a driverless car decide between whether it will kill two babies next to the roadside, or all five adult passengers inside the car?” While raised in a new context, this ethical choice question is actually an old chestnut, a variant of the well-known Trolley Problem4 that students in philosophy classes have discussed for decades. The Trolley Problem, conceived by Philippa Foot in 1967, describes the ethical conundrum of “a driver of a runaway tram [who] can steer only from one narrow track onto another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed.” Most people will do the simple utilitarian calculation that five lives are worth more than one, and consider this a no-brainer.

…

Henry Miller and Shih-lung Shaw, Geographic Information Systems for Transportation: Principles and Applications (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 2. Alexis Madrigal, “How Google Builds Its Maps and What It Means for the Future,” The Atlantic, September 2012. 3. “Summary of Travel Trends 2009,” National Household Travel Survey, http://nhts.ornl.gov/2009/pub/stt.pdf 4. Philippa Foot, The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect in Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978) (originally appeared in the Oxford Review, no. 5, 1967). 5. Noah J. Goodall, “Ethical Decision Making during Automated Vehicle Crashes,” Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2014. 12 The Ripple Effects Now that we’ve nearly reached the end of this book, we would like to bring up an issue that any in-depth exploration of driverless cars would be incomplete if it did not address: the topic of hype.

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right by Michael Brooks

4chan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Bernie Sanders, capitalist realism, centre right, Community Supported Agriculture, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Flynn Effect, gun show loophole, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trolley problem, universal basic income, upwardly mobile

According to my friend Ben Burgis, the author of Give Them An Argument: Logic for the Left, a thought experiment generally refers to two things: first, an imaginary situation designed to test whether a certain definition of a concept captures what we really mean by it, and second, an imaginary situation in which we bring two moral principles into conflict in order to discover which one we care more about. The most famous thought experiment is the so-called “Trolley Problem,” which was originally formulated by the British philosopher Philippa Foot, though the version that most people are familiar with incorporates a change suggested by the American philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson. Here’s Foot’s original example: Edward is the driver of a trolley whose breaks have just failed. On the track ahead of him are five people; the banks are so steep that they are not able to get off the track in time.

Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds by Kevin Dutton

availability heuristic, Bernie Madoff, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, credit crunch, different worldview, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, equity premium, fundamental attribution error, haute couture, job satisfaction, Jon Ronson, loss aversion, Milgram experiment, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile

I’ve got hidden shallows.’ Right Track? 4The comparison between psychopaths and non-psychopaths with regard to hot and cold empathy may best be illustrated through the results of brain-imaging studies. 5Consider, for example, the following scenario (Case 1), first proposed by the British moral philosopher Philippa Foot. A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flick a switch that will lead the trolley down a fork in the track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that fork. Question: Should you hit the switch?

…

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1121 (2007): 461–479. For a less specialised account see Carl Zimmer ‘Whose Life Would You Save?’ Discover (April 2004). http://discovermagazine.com/2004/apr/whose-life-would-you-save (accessed January 9th, 2007). 5 Consider, for example … The Trolley Problem was first proposed in this form by Philippa Foot in ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect’. In Virtues and vices and other essays in moral philosophy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978). 6 Now consider the following … Thomson, Judith J. ‘Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem.’ The Monist 59 (1976): 204–17.

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish

Albert Einstein, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bitcoin, Black Swan, colonial rule, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, feminist movement, Garrett Hardin, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Bogle, Linda problem, mandelbrot fractal, Pepsi Challenge, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, Richard Feynman, statistical model, stem cell, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem

Ahead of you are five people who will die should your trolley continue on the track. At the last moment you notice a spur that has one person on it. What do you do? Do you continue on and kill the five, or do you divert and kill the one? This experiment was first proposed in modern form by Philippa Foot in her paper “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,”3 and further considered extensively by Judith Jarvis Thomson in “The Trolley Problem.”4 In both cases the value of the thought experiment is clear. The authors were able to explore situations that would be physically impossible to reproduce without causing serious harm, and in so doing significantly advanced certain questions of morality.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

You can save these five people by diverting the trolley onto a different set of tracks that has only one person on it, but that person will be killed. Is it morally permissible to turn the trolley and thus prevent five deaths at the cost of one? First posed as a thought problem in a paper about the ethics of abortion by British philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967, it has led to endless philosophical discussions on the implications of choosing the lesser evil.9 More recently it has been similarly framed for robot vehicles deciding between avoiding five schoolchildren who have run out onto the road when the only option is swerving onto the sidewalk to avoid them, thus killing a single adult bystander.

…

_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0. 8.Lawrence D. Burns, William C. Jordan, and Bonnie A. Scarborough, “Transforming Personal Mobility,” The Earth Institute, Columbia University, January 27, 2013, http://sustainablemo bility.ei.columbia.edu/files/2012/12/Transforming-Personal-Mobility-Jan-27-20132.pdf. 9.William Grimes, “Philippa Foot, Renowned Philosopher, Dies at 90,” New York Times, October 9, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/us/10foot.html. 10.“Transportation and Material Moving Occupations,” Occupational Outlook Handbook, Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/home.htm. 11.Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1, 1945, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881. 12.Peter Norvig, keynote address, NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Conference, Stanford, California, February 5, 2014. 3|A TOUGH YEAR FOR THE HUMAN RACE 1.John Markoff, “Skilled Work, without the Worker,” New York Times, August 18, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-industry.html. 2.Ibid. 3.Norbert Wiener, Collected Works with Commentaries, ed.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, classic study, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, different worldview, disruptive innovation, domesticated silver fox, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Garrett Hardin, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, iterative process, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, joint-stock company, land tenure, language acquisition, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, out of africa, overview effect, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

From this perspective, these natural constraints and definitions can stop an otherwise endless relativistic moral regress.61 We could say that a society is good when it enhances its members’ happiness or survival. Such are the constraints against which both evolution and morality abut. This, too, is an ancient idea, at least as old as Plato and Aristotle. Philosopher Philippa Foot famously and provocatively said, “In moral philosophy it is useful, I believe, to think about plants.”62 She argued that there is no fundamental difference between a notion of “good,” whether the topic is a tree having “good roots” or people being in a “good” state. The roots have a purpose, a logical constraint that they must satisfy, which sets the standard for deciding whether they are good or not.

…

Hume, “Concerning Moral Sentiment,” appendix 1 in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (London: A. Millar, 1751), p. 289. 59. Taken from a documentary featuring a conversation between Iris Murdoch and David Pears that was part of the TV series Logic Lane (1972), directed by Michael Chanan; cited in N. Krishna, “Is Goodness Natural?,” Aeon, November 28, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/how-philippa-foot-set-her-mind-against-prevailing-moral-philosophy. 60. R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). 61. D. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Knopf, 2016). 62. P. Foot, cited in R. Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 196. See also P.

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

Although it wasn’t intended as a serious ethical framework for AI, we can see it as the ancestor of a whole host of such frameworks that have appeared alongside the recent growth of AI, and have been the subject of serious research.6 In the remainder of this chapter, we will survey this work, and discuss whether or not it is heading in the right direction. We’ll begin our survey with one particular scenario which has attracted more attention in the ethical AI community than perhaps any other. The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment in the philosophy of ethics, originally introduced by British philosopher Philippa Foot in the late 1960s.7 Her aim in introducing the Trolley Problem was to disentangle some of the highly emotive issues surrounding the morality of abortion. There are many versions of Foot’s trolley problem, but the most common version goes something like this (see Figure 21): A trolley (i.e. a tram) has gone out of control, and is careering at high speed towards five people who are unable to move.

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

For example, when confronted with a choice about whether to swerve into a bicycle lane to protect the car’s driver or to harm parents bicycling with their children, what should the autonomous system that pilots the car be programmed to do? Consider a hypothetical dilemma introduced by the English philosopher Philippa Foot in the late 1960s, the “Trolley Problem,” that has now become a real problem for engineers. In the context of autonomous cars, the problem asks whether a vehicle should be programmed to endanger or sacrifice the life of its sole passenger by running off the road in order to avoid potentially hitting five pedestrians crossing the road.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

You can view the puppet shows from links at www.yale.edu/infantlab/In_the_Media.html. This technique of measuring infants’ attributions was first developed by Kuhlmeier, Wynn, and Bloom 2003. 37. Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom 2007, p. 559. 38. For early writings on this idea, see Hoffman 1982; Kagan 1984. 39. The trolley dilemma was first discussed by philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thompson. 40. Some philosophers note the difference that in the bridge story you are using the victim as a means to an end, whereas in the switch story the victim is not a means to an end; his death is just an unfortunate side effect. Greene and others have therefore tested alternative versions, such as the case where the switch only saves lives because it diverts the trolley onto a side loop where one man is standing.

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

. … It is thanks to this decoupling that AI can colonise tasks whenever this can be achieved without understanding, awareness, sensitivity, hunches, experience or even wisdom. In short, it is precisely when we stop trying to reproduce human intelligence that we can successfully replace it. Otherwise, AlphaGo would have never become so much better than anyone at playing Go.103 In philosopher Philippa Foot’s famous “Trolley Problem”104 thought experiment, participants are asked what they would do if they saw a train carriage (a trolley), heading down railway tracks, towards five workmen who are in the train’s path and would not have a chance to move before being hit. If the participant does nothing, the train will hit the five workmen.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The pilots have it locked in; their missiles are ready. The plane is running out of gas. The fate of the passengers, and the entire United States, rests upon your orders. What do you do? This, of course, is a “trolley problem,” an ethical thought experiment, of the type popularized by the philosopher Philippa Foot, that pits our moral duty not to inflict harm on others against our social responsibility to save a greater number of lives. It’s also, however, a handy metaphor, because the highly contagious disease the passengers are carrying is, as you doubtless have noticed, nothing more than a faster-acting version of aging.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

David Hume, ‘Of the Original Contract’, in Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 283. 43. See Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 43–5. 44. Aaron Perzanowksi and Jason Schultz, The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2016), 4. 45. See Philippa Foot, ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect’, in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 46. Lessig, Code 2.0, 78. 47. Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It) (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), 55. 48.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature by Steven Pinker

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bob Geldof, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Ford Model T, fudge factor, George Santayana, language acquisition, Laplace demon, loss aversion, luminiferous ether, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, science of happiness, social contagion, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, trolley problem, urban renewal, Yogi Berra

The semantic distinction between after and from points to a causal distinction between succession and impingement, which in turn animates a moral distinction between tragedy and evil. Another force-dynamic distinction, the one between causing and letting, deeply penetrates our moral reasoning. The difference is exposed in the trolley problem, a famous thought experiment devised by the philosopher Philippa Foot that has long been a talking point among moral philosophers. 141 A trolley is hurtling out of control and is bearing down on five railroad workers who don’t see it coming. You are standing by a switch and can divert the trolley onto another track, though it will then kill a single worker who hasn’t noticed the danger either.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

* But what if the monkey chooses the two-marshmallow option over the marshmallow/celery one because, well, having any sort of situation with two marshmallows on the scene was just so much more exciting? The authors did a nice control—when there was no monkey in the adjacent space, the choice would be random as to what food was deposited in the second space. * Actually, the trolley problem was invented by the British philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967. * And as alluded to earlier, people with vmPFC damage are strongly and equally willing to pull the lever or push the person. You see the same if you give people a benzodiazepine (a tranquilizer like Valium). The vmPFC and amygdala are calmed down (both by direct actions of the drug and secondarily via damping of the sympathetic nervous system), and people are more willing to push