Algorithms and Autonomy

Algorithms and Autonomy PDF

Author: Alan Rubel

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-05-20

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1108841813

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This book examines how algorithms in criminal justice, education, housing, elections and beyond affect autonomy, freedom, and democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Our Robots, Ourselves

Our Robots, Ourselves PDF

Author: David A. Mindell

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-10-13

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0698157664

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“[An] essential book… it is required reading as we seriously engage one of the most important debates of our time.”—Sherry Turkle, author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age From drones to Mars rovers—an exploration of the most innovative use of robots today and a provocative argument for the crucial role of humans in our increasingly technological future. In Our Robots, Ourselves, David Mindell offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the cutting edge of robotics today, debunking commonly held myths and exploring the rapidly changing relationships between humans and machines. Drawing on firsthand experience, extensive interviews, and the latest research from MIT and elsewhere, Mindell takes us to extreme environments—high atmosphere, deep ocean, and outer space—to reveal where the most advanced robotics already exist. In these environments, scientists use robots to discover new information about ancient civilizations, to map some of the world’s largest geological features, and even to “commute” to Mars to conduct daily experiments. But these tools of air, sea, and space also forecast the dangers, ethical quandaries, and unintended consequences of a future in which robotics and automation suffuse our everyday lives. Mindell argues that the stark lines we’ve drawn between human and not human, manual and automated, aren’t helpful for understanding our relationship with robotics. Brilliantly researched and accessibly written, Our Robots, Ourselves clarifies misconceptions about the autonomous robot, offering instead a hopeful message about what he calls “rich human presence” at the center of the technological landscape we are now creating.

Autonomous

Autonomous PDF

Author: Annalee Newitz

Publisher: Tor Books

Published: 2017-09-19

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0765392070

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"Autonomous is to biotech and AI what Neuromancer was to the Internet."—Neal Stephenson "Something genuinely and thrillingly new in the naturalistic, subjective, paradoxically humanistic but non-anthropomorphic depiction of bot-POV—and all in the service of vivid, solid storytelling."—William Gibson When anything can be owned, how can we be free Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap scrips for poor people who can’t otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack has left a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, doing repetitive tasks until they become unsafe or insane. Hot on her trail, an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his robotic partner, Paladin. As they race to stop information about the sinister origins of Jack’s drug from getting out, they begin to form an uncommonly close bond that neither of them fully understand. And underlying it all is one fundamental question: Is freedom possible in a culture where everything, even people, can be owned?

Kant on Moral Autonomy

Kant on Moral Autonomy PDF

Author: Oliver Sensen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1107004861

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This book explores the central importance Kant's concept of autonomy for contemporary moral thought and modern philosophy.

Personal Autonomy in Society

Personal Autonomy in Society PDF

Author: Marina Oshana

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1351911953

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People are socially situated amid complex relations with other people and are bound by interpersonal frameworks having significant influence upon their lives. These facts have implications for their autonomy. Challenging many of the currently accepted conceptions of autonomy and of how autonomy is valued, Oshana develops a 'social-relational' account of autonomy, or self-governance, as a condition of persons that is largely constituted by a person’s relations with other people and by the absence of certain social relations. She denies that command over one's motives and the freedom to realize one's will are sufficient to secure the kind of command over one's life that autonomy requires, and argues against psychological, procedural, and content neutral accounts of autonomy. Oshana embraces the idea that her account is 'perfectionist' in a sense, and argues that ultimately our commitment to autonomy is defeasible, but she maintains that a social-relational account best captures what we value about autonomy and best serves the various ends for which the concept of autonomy is employed.

The Autonomy Myth

The Autonomy Myth PDF

Author: Martha Albertson Fineman

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 9781565849761

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An exposé of flaws in American policies regarding the self-reliance of families argues that policymakers have compromised the well-being of everyday individuals by limiting the definition of acceptable family units and placing unrealistic responsibilities on contemporary families, presenting a model for "caretaking relationships" that provides extra support for children and the elderly. Reprint.

Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy

Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy PDF

Author: Ken Gemes

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-05-07

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 0199231567

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Nietzsche is a central figure in our modern understanding of the individual as freely determining his or her own values. These essays by leading Nietzsche scholars investigate what this freedom really means: How free are we really? What does it take to be free? It might be a 'right', but it also needs to be earned.

Personal Autonomy

Personal Autonomy PDF

Author: James Stacey Taylor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-01-10

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 9781139442718

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Autonomy has recently become one of the central concepts in contemporary moral philosophy and has generated much debate over its nature and value. This 2005 volume brings together essays that address the theoretical foundations of the concept of autonomy, as well as essays that investigate the relationship between autonomy and moral responsibility, freedom, political philosophy, and medical ethics. Written by some of the most prominent philosophers working in these areas, this book represents research on the nature and value of autonomy that will be essential reading for a broad swathe of philosophers as well as many psychologists.

The autonomous life?

The autonomous life? PDF

Author: Nazima Kadir

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2016-06-07

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1784998001

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This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) open access license. The Autonomous Life? is an ethnography of the squatters' movement in Amsterdam written by an anthropologist who lived and worked in a squatters' community for over three years. During that time she resided as a squatter in four different houses, worked on two successful anti-gentrification campaigns, was evicted from two houses and jailed once. With this unique perspective, Kadir systematically examines the contradiction between what people say and what they practice in a highly ideological radicalleftcommunity. The squatters' movement defines itself primarily as anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian, and yet is perpetually plagued by the contradiction between this public disavowal and the maintenance of hierarchy and authority within the movement. This study analyses how this contradiction is then reproduced in different micro-social interactions, examining the methods by which people negotiate minute details of their daily lives as squatter activists in the face of a fun house mirror of ideological expectations reflecting values from within the squatter community, that, in turn, often refract mainstream, middle-class norms. Using a unique critical perspective informed by gender and subaltern studies, this study contributes to social movements literature through a meticulous analysis of the production of power and hierarchy in a social movement subculture.

Regulating Autonomy

Regulating Autonomy PDF

Author: Shelley Day Sclater

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2009-03-04

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1847314996

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These essays explore the nature and limits of individual autonomy in law, policy and the work of regulatory agencies. Authors ask searching questions about the nature and scope of the regulation of 'private' lives, from intimacies, personal relationships and domestic lives to reproduction. They question the extent to which the law does, or should, protect individual autonomy. Recent rapid advances in the development of new technologies - particularly those concerned with human genetics and assisted reproduction - have generated new questions (practical, social, legal and ethical) about how far the state should intervene in individual decision making. Is there an inevitable tension between individual liberty and the common good? How might a workable balance between the public and the private be struck? How, indeed, should we think about 'autonomy'? The essays explore the arguments used to create and maintain the boundaries of autonomy - for example, the protection of the vulnerable, public goods of various kinds, and the maintenance of tradition and respect for cultural practices. Contributors address how those boundaries should be drawn and interventions justified. How are contemporary ethical debates about autonomy constructed, and what principles do they embody? What happens when those principles become manifest in law?