A critically important ethical issue facing the AI research community is how AI research and AI products can be responsibly conceptualised and presented to the public. A good deal of fear and concern about uncontrollable AI is now being displayed in public discourse. Public understanding of AI is being shaped in a way that may ultimately impede AI research. The public discourse as well as discourse among AI researchers leads to at least two problems: a confusion about the notion of (...) ‘autonomy’ that induces people to attribute to machines something comparable to human autonomy, and a ‘sociotechnical blindness’ that hides the essential role played by humans at every stage of the design and deployment of an AI system. Here our purpose is to develop and use a language with the aim to reframe the discourse in AI and shed light on the real issues in the discipline. (shrink)

José Ortega y Gasset and Hannah Arendt were two thinkers influenced by the phenomenological tradition for whom worldly experiences within a specific circumstance were essential to what it means to be human. This article, first, examines their notions of ‘amor mundi’ (Arendt) and ‘salvation of circumstance’ (Ortega), pointing out their similarities concerning the individual’s relationship to the world. It then moves on to investigate some of Ortega’s and Arendt’s conceptions about science, technology, and the concomitant bureaucratization and technocratization of the (...) world. The main thesis of this article will be that both thinkers fundamentally coincide on how the individual must relate to an increasingly scientifically and technologically-mediated world that produces isolation and mass–people. (shrink)