IEG and GPI Newsletter

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The latest issue of Oxford Information Ethics research Group (IEG) and UH research Group on the Philosophy of Information (GPI) is now available online here.

The previous issues may be accessed here.

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The Last Stand of an Utopian View: Net Neutrality

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"[IN the US] Both the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation are expected to review Net neutrality-related bills later this week. " In many countries (the UK is an exception) museums are not free: people pay to enjoy their culture. In many countries (the UK, again, is largely an exception), drivers pay tolls to use motorways. Sometime they can choose longer and slower but free routes instead, sometime they just have no alternative. In every country, people pay different rates for different postal services and for different flight routes. So why the Internet, whether you compare it to a motorway, to a museum, to ordinary mail or to aerial transports, should not be subject to the same usage-related rule? Users (read: companies) should be able to choose among ordinary (slower) and premium (faster) delivery services. What's wrong with this? Well, several things. Many of the social and economic counter-arguments are rather...
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(revised on Medium) On Philosophy's envy of her four sisters (series: notes to myself)

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Philosophy has four sisters: Mathematics, Poetry, Religion, and Science. She envies all of them. She would like to be as powerfully abstract, and rigorously demonstrative, and practically useful, and timeless ... as she believes Mathematics to be. But failing, she ends up calculating the qualitative, formalising the undefinable, inferring the trivial, and missing the obvious: useless, empty, self-referential. She would like to be as delicately perceptive, and existentially fine-tuned, and meaningfully profound, and experientially rich ... as she believes Poetry to be. But failing, she ends up blathering obscure intuitions, prophesying in an esoteric language, playing with words while disrespecting facts and reasonings, obsessed with invented etymologies but oblivious of actual meanings: unhinged, nonsensical, unaccountable. She would like to be as methodologically driven, and systematically explanatory, and epistemically foundational, and progressively cumulative ... as she believes ...
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Trusting trust the Ebay way

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Advertisement used to do exactly this: informing you that a lot of other costumers were trusting X, so you could as well. Then it became something else, but that is another story. There is a form of bottom-up advertisement, a sort of electronic word-of-keyboard, that the digital era has made possible again: customers' comments and feedback. Everyone has more or less learnt the lesson, from Amazon to Saynsbury's, but the master is Ebay. On Ebay, sellers and buyers need to build their reputation the hard way: by being good sellers and buyers. It is a reinforcing process: you are judged by the people you do business with; the better your reputation the more business you may have, the more likely it is that you will wish to do your best to make sure that your reputation, gained with so much effort, remains untarnished and may even improved, which means that buyers are more likely to do business with you, but the more business you are likely to enjoy... and so on. Some time ago, spe...
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The Loebner Prize from a judge's perspective

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This year, for the first time in its history, the Loebner Prize competition was held in England, at the University of Reading to be precise. It was organised by Kevin Warwick and Huma Shah. Independently of whether Turing might have been pleased (he was not well treated in this country, recall?), there was a satisfying sense of “coming home” of the Turing Test (henceforth TT ). Expectations were high, and they very highly advertised too. The meeting was perfectly organised. Having been invited to play the role of a judge, together with several other colleagues, including two members of the IEG , Mariarosaria Taddeo and Matteo Turilli ( here are their pictures and Rosaria's interview ) , I enjoyed the opportunity to see from close-up the machinery and the TT . It was intriguing and great fun. Because there were interviews with the BBC and other things going on, and because we were also supposed to take part in the parallel AISB Symposium on the TT , I had time to test only...
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Mind the app - considerations on the ethical risks of COVID-19 apps

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[22 April update: at the Digital Ethics Lab (OII, University of Oxford) we have elaborated a list of 16 questions to check whether an app is ethically justifiable, the full article, open access, is available here ] There is a lot of talk about apps to deal with the pandemic . Some of the best solutions use the Bluetooth connection of mobile phones to determine the contact between people and therefore the probability of contagion. In theory, it may seem simple. In practice, there are several ethical problems, not only legal and  technical ones . To understand them, it is useful to distinguish between the validation and the verification of a system.  The validation of a system answers the question: "are we building the right system?". The answer is no if the app is illegal,  for example, the use of an app in the EU must comply with the GDPR; mind that this is necessary but not sufficient to make the app also ethically acceptable, see below; is unnecessar...
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I just published "On asking the wrong kind of questions (series: notes to myself)", happy 2024. https://link.medium.com/thDMgqTvZFb
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On the value of taking care of the roses (series: notes to myself)

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They say that what matters sometimes is not the outcome but the process: not the success or failure of an action, but just the action itself.  Maybe. But I always thought it was a bit of sour grapes. Didn’t really want beautiful roses in my garden, kind of line of thinking. The important thing was gardening. Or so you tell yourself, trying to be convincing.  But I recite this loudly a few times and it still sounds quite lame. It's the philosopher's fault, because he asks the unpleasant questions. Would you have done it anyway, even if the roses had no chance? But above all, what if the process itself is also pointless? Perhaps the gardening is a failure too, like the dead roses.  So you pause, on your way to the roses, and think: if the outcome is not what matters, and the process is not what matters, why caring for the roses? Better stop, or kill the realist awareness that shows the worthless nature of the whole enterprise.  Is there anything left, if all is ...
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(revised on Medium) On a sachet of brown sugar (series: notes to myself)

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Mid-morning, somewhere in Italy. Seating at a bar, in an elegant square, summery weather, a kind breeze, refreshing. An espresso macchiato comes with a brown sachet of sugar, to be added if you wish. I look at it. I look around. I have time to think. How do people deal with this task? Can one divide people, the sugary kind, into types according to how they open a sachet of sugar? A student, with interesting tattoos on her left shoulder, opens it by pinching the two sides and pulling them, gently ungluing the sachet. It requires her to use four fingers, each couple pinching a side of the sachet. She is attentive and careful. She better be. I know that feat is demanding. Too much force and the sachet may give in abruptly, spreading the sugar everywhere. Too little, and the little shell will hold on to its content and won’t be convinced to release its treasure. I love the cautions determination. She puts her hands together, palms touching at the bottom as if praying, to measure the effort...
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