Techno-Optimism: An Analysis, an Evaluation and a Modest Defence

Danaher, J. 

Philos. Technol. 35, 54 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-022-00550-2

Abstract

What is techno-optimism and how can it be defended? Although techno-optimist views are widely espoused and critiqued, there have been few attempts to systematically analyse what it means to be a techno-optimist and how one might defend this view. This paper attempts to address this oversight by providing a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of techno-optimism. It is argued that techno-optimism is a pluralistic stance that comes in weak and strong forms. These vary along a number of key dimensions but each shares the view that technology plays a key role in ensuring that the good prevails over the bad. Whatever its strength, to defend this stance, one must flesh out an argument with four key premises. Each of these premises is highly controversial and can be subjected to a number of critiques. The paper discusses five such critiques in detail (the values critique, the treadmill critique, the sustainability critique, the irrationality critique and the insufficiency critique). The paper also considers possible responses from the techno-optimist. Finally, it is concluded that although strong forms of techno-optimism are not intellectually defensible, a modest, agency-based version of techno-optimism may be defensible.

Here is an excerpt:

To be more precise, a modest, agency-based view of techno-optimism entails the following four claims. First, it is epistemically rational to believe that it is at least possible (perhaps probable) that technology plays a key role in ensuring that the good prevails over the bad. Second, whether this possibility materialises depends to some meaningful extent on the power of collective human agency. If we select the right goals, make the concerted effort, and build the necessary institutions, there is a chance that the possibility materialises. Third, by believing that we can, collectively, achieve this, we increase the likelihood of this possibility materialising because we make it more likely that we will act in ways that ensure the desired outcomes (this is the adaptation of Bortolotti’s agency-based optimism to the case for techno-optimism). Fourth, it follows from that that we should cultivate the belief that we can achieve this and act upon that belief. In other words, that our optimism should not simply be an inert belief but, rather, a belief that actually motivates our collective human agency.

If the agency-based view is incorporated into it, techno-optimism can then be an intellectually defensible view. It need not be an irrational faith in the inexorable march of technology but, rather, a realistic stance grounded in the transformational power of collective human agency to forge the right social institutions and to translate the right ideas into material technologies.

The paper is here.

AI bias can arise from annotation instructions

K. Wiggers & D. Coldeway

TechCrunch

Originally posted 8 MAY 22

Here is an excerpt:

As it turns out, annotators’ predispositions might not be solely to blame for the presence of bias in training labels. In a preprint study out of Arizona State University and the Allen Institute for AI, researchers investigated whether a source of bias might lie in the instructions written by dataset creators to serve as guides for annotators. Such instructions typically include a short description of the task (e.g., “Label all birds in these photos”) along with several examples.

The researchers looked at 14 different “benchmark” datasets used to measure the performance of natural language processing systems, or AI systems that can classify, summarize, translate and otherwise analyze or manipulate text. In studying the task instructions provided to annotators that worked on the datasets, they found evidence that the instructions influenced the annotators to follow specific patterns, which then propagated to the datasets. For example, over half of the annotations in Quoref, a dataset designed to test the ability of AI systems to understand when two or more expressions refer to the same person (or thing), start with the phrase “What is the name,” a phrase present in a third of the instructions for the dataset.

The phenomenon, which the researchers call “instruction bias,” is particularly troubling because it suggests that systems trained on biased instruction/annotation data might not perform as well as initially thought. Indeed, the co-authors found that instruction bias overestimates the performance of systems and that these systems often fail to generalize beyond instruction patterns.

The silver lining is that large systems, like OpenAI’s GPT-3, were found to be generally less sensitive to instruction bias. But the research serves as a reminder that AI systems, like people, are susceptible to developing biases from sources that aren’t always obvious. The intractable challenge is discovering these sources and mitigating the downstream impact.

The info is here.

Preventing Suicide Through Better Firearm Safety Policy in the United States

J. W. Swanson

Psychiatric Services

Volume 72, Issue 2

February 01, 2021, 174-179

Abstract

The U.S. suicide rate continues to increase, despite federal investment in developing preventive behavioral health care interventions. Important determinants of suicide—social, economic, and circumstantial—have little or no connection to psychopathology. Firearm injuries account for over half of suicides, and firearm access is perhaps the most important modifiable determinant. Thus gun safety policy deserves special attention as a pathway to suicide prevention. This article summarizes arguments for several recommended statutory modifications to firearm restrictions at the state level. The policy challenge is to develop and implement evidence-based strategies to keep guns out of the hands of people at highest risk of suicide, without unduly infringing the rights of a large number of gun owners who are unlikely to harm anyone. Recommendations for states include expansion and refinement of legal criteria prohibiting firearm purchase, possession, or access to better align with suicide risk, including prohibition for persons with brief involuntary psychiatric holds or repeated alcohol-impaired driving convictions; enactment of extreme risk protection order laws, which allow temporary removal of firearms from persons who are behaving dangerously, and entering purchase prohibition data for these persons in the FBI’s background-check database; and adoption of an innovative policy known as precommitment against suicide as well as voluntary self-enrollment in the FBI’s background-check database.

Highlights

• Suicide is caused by many factors in addition to mental illness and often cannot be prevented by mental health treatment alone.

• Access to firearms is one of the most important modifiable determinants of suicide mortality in the United States.

• Evidence-based firearm restrictions and policies that limit gun access to people who pose a clear risk of intentional self-harm could prevent many suicides without infringing the rights of lawful gun owners.

Important data points

Overall, 60% of males who died by suicide had no known mental health conditions. Across all age groups, firearm suicides were more common among males without known mental health conditions compared with males who had known mental health conditions. Between 32% and 40% of all young and middle-aged adults in the study had a history of problematic substance use. Between 43% and 48% of all young and middle-aged adults tested positive for alcohol at the time of their death.

The research is here.

What happens if you want access to voluntary assisted dying but your nursing home won’t let you?

Neera Bhatia & Charles Corke

The Conversation

Originally published 30 MAY 22

Voluntary assisted dying is now lawful in all Australian states. There is also widespread community support for it.

Yet some residential institutions, such as hospices and aged-care facilities, are obstructing access despite the law not specifying whether they have the legal right to do so.

As voluntary assisted dying is implemented across the country, institutions blocking access to it will likely become more of an issue.

So addressing this will help everyone – institutions, staff, families and, most importantly, people dying in institutions who wish to have control of their end.

The many ways to block access

While voluntary assisted dying legislation recognises the right of doctors to conscientiously object to it, the law is generally silent on the rights of institutions to do so.

• While the institution where someone lives has no legislated role in voluntary assisted dying, it can refuse access in various ways, including:

• restricting staff responding to a discussion a resident initiates about voluntary assisted dying

• refusing access to health professionals to facilitate it, and

• requiring people who wish to pursue the option to leave the facility.

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What could we do better?

1. Institutions need to be up-front about their policies

Institutions need to be completely open about their policies on voluntary assisted dying and whether they would obstruct any such request in the future. This is so patients and families can factor this into deciding on an institution in the first place.

2. Institutions need to consult their stakeholders

Institutions should consult their stakeholders about their policy with a view to creating a “safe” environment for residents and staff – for those who want access to voluntary assisted dying or who wish to support it, and for those who don’t want it and find it confronting.

3. Laws need to change

Future legislation should define the extent of an institution’s right to obstruct a resident’s right to access voluntary assisted dying.

The info is here.

A study gave cash and therapy to men at risk of criminal behavior

Sigal Samuel 

vox.com

Originally posted 31 MAY 22

Here is an excerpt:

Inspired by the program in Liberia, Chicago has been implementing a similar but more intensive program called READI. Over the course of 18 months, men in the city’s most violent districts participate in therapy sessions in the morning, followed by job training in the afternoon. The rationale for the latter is that in a place with a well-developed labor market like Chicago, the best way to improve earnings is probably to get people into the market, whereas in Liberia, the labor market is much less efficient, so it made more sense to offer people cash.

“We’ll have more results this summer,” said Blattman of the READI program, which he is helping to advise. So far, “it doesn’t look like a slam dunk.”

Still, Chicago is eager to try these therapy-based approaches, having already had some success with them. The city is also home to a program called Becoming a Man (BAM), where high schoolers do CBT-inspired group sessions. A randomized controlled trial showed that criminal arrests fell by about half during the BAM program. Even though effects dissipated over time, the program looks to be very cost-effective.

But this isn’t just a story about the growing recognition that therapy can play a useful role in preventing crime. That trend is part of a broader movement to adopt an approach to crime that is more carrot, less stick.

“It’s all about a progressive, rational policy for social control. Social inclusion is the most productive means of social control,” David Brotherton, a sociologist at the City University of New York, explained to me in 2019.

Brotherton has long argued that mainstream US policy is counterproductively coercive and punitive. His research has shown that helping at-risk people reintegrate into mainstream society — including by offering them cash — is much more effective at reducing violence.

The info is here.

The narcissistic appeal of leadership theories

Steffens, N. K., & Haslam, S. A. (2022). 

American Psychologist, 77(2), 234–248.

https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000738

Leadership is one of the most researched topics in psychological and other social and behavioral sciences. It is routinely seen as vital to the success and vitality of various forms of collaborative activity not only in organizations but in society at large. This has provided the stimulus for a massive amount of theoretical and applied research and also supports a huge industry. But to whom does this body of work appeal? More specifically, does it appeal to people with a broad interest in advancing groups and society or to people who are primarily interested in promoting themselves? To answer this question, we explore the extent to which individuals’ narcissism predicts their endorsement of leadership theories. Results provide empirical evidence that the more narcissistic people are, the more they find leadership theories appealing and the more interest they have in learning about the ideas behind particular theories. The predictive power of narcissism also holds when accounting for other variables (including demographic, Big Five traits, and ideological and motivational variables). We conclude that psychological theorizing about leadership can be a double-edged sword in so far as the lionization of leaders(hip) appeals to, and legitimizes, the tastes of a narcissistic audience.

Impact Statement

This research shows that people are more likely to endorse scientific theories of leadership, and to want to know more about them, the more narcissistic they are. This remains true when accounting for a variety of factors including demographic variables, leadership experience, Big Five personality traits, and ideological and motivational variables. These results suggest that people’s engagement with leadership research is motivated more by a personal concern for the self than by a social concern for the greater good.

From the Conclusion

Consistent with this proposition, the present results show that the more narcissistic individuals are, the more they endorse various theories of leadership and the more they want to learn about them. This in turn suggests that what motivates people to engage with leadership theory is more a personal concern for the self than a social concern for the greater good.

A pdf of the research is here.

Mental Illness Is Not in Your Head

Marco Ramos

Boston Review

Originally posted 17 MAY 22

Here are two excerpts:

In Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness, Anne Harrington argues that the current crisis is just the latest in a long line of failures to discover the biology of mental illness over the last two centuries. In this sweeping study, the history of psychiatry undulates like the boom and bust of a speculative market. First a wave builds with enthusiastic promises of revolutionary breakthroughs that will change psychiatry as we know it. Then the wave collapses, as psychiatrists fail to deliver on those bold promises. Crisis ensues, and after the requisite finger-pointing, the next wave of psychiatric revolution begins to build. Rinse and repeat.

The first “revolution” in American psychiatry that Harrington tracks arrived in the nineteenth century. At the time, large lunatic asylums dominated the psychiatric landscape, such as the Blackwell’s Island hospital on what today is called Roosevelt Island in New York City. These institutions were designed to cure patients with mental disorders by placing them in the hospitable environment of the asylum architectural space. However, a series of journalistic exposés revealed that these asylums were overcrowded and underfunded with patients living in deplorable, instead of therapeutic, conditions. For example, in 1887, journalist Elizabeth Seaman, who wrote under the pen name Nellie Bly, went undercover as a patient in Blackwell’s Island Hospital and exposed horrible acts of brutality in her best-seller Ten Days in a Mad-House. Asylum psychiatry faced a crisis of public trust.

As Harrington explains, European neuroanatomists came to the rescue. Unlike asylum physicians, anatomists were pessimistic about the potential for a cure. Building on eugenic theories, they believed that asylum patients were “degenerates” who were biologically unfit to cope with the stresses of modern life. But they also believed that the mentally ill could provide a service to society after their deaths by offering their brains to science. The dissection of their pathological brains, the anatomists hoped, could reveal the biological causes of mental suffering.

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But if the pharmaceutical industry has invested so heavily in psychiatry, why have there been no breakthroughs in drug treatment? A major reason is that the industry has spent billions of dollars more on advertising psychiatric medications than on research and development of novel drugs. As psychiatrist David Healy has shown, money earmarked for R&D is often not intended to produce genuine innovation. Almost all of the psychopharmaceuticals produced since 1990 have been “copycats” that mimic older, generic pharmaceuticals, with only minor chemical modifications. These (unfortunately named) “me-too” drugs work no better clinically than the drugs that came before them, but their slight biochemical novelty means that they can be patented, so that pharma can charge insurance companies’ top dollar.

Perhaps the worst news is that Big Pharma, having created and capitalized on psychiatric markets, is now jumping ship. Anthropologist Joe Dumit has shown that most psychiatric drugs will soon go off patent, so companies will be forced to charge less for them. With the market already saturated with pharmaceutical copycats and no significant scientific biological breakthroughs in sight, there is suddenly little room for growth. Almost all of the major pharmaceutical companies have decided to divest from psychiatric drug research and turn to more promising sectors, especially the development of “biologics” and other cancer drugs.

The info is here.

Shadow of conflict: How past conflict influences group cooperation and the use of punishment

J. Grossa, C. K. W. DeDreua, & L. Reddmann

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Volume 171, July 2022, 104152

Abstract

Intergroup conflict profoundly affects the welfare of groups and can deteriorate intergroup relations long after the conflict is over. Here, we experimentally investigate how the experience of an intergroup conflict influences the ability of groups to establish cooperation after conflict. We induced conflict by using a repeated attacker-defender game in which groups of four are divided into two ‘attackers’ that can invest resources to take away resources from the other two participants in the role of ‘defenders.’ After the conflict, groups engaged in a repeated public goods game with peer-punishment, in which group members could invest resources to benefit the group and punish other group members for their decisions. Previous conflict did not significantly reduce group cooperation compared to a control treatment in which groups did not experience the intergroup conflict. However, when having experienced an intergroup conflict, individuals punished free-riding during the repeated public goods game less harshly and did not react to punishment by previous attackers, ultimately reducing group welfare. This result reveals an important boundary condition for peer punishment institutions. Peer punishment is less able to efficiently promote cooperation amid a ‘shadow of conflict.’ In a third treatment, we tested whether such ‘maladaptive’ punishment patterns induced by previous conflict can be mitigated by hiding the group members’ conflict roles during the subsequent public goods provision game. We find more cooperation when individuals could not identify each other as (previous) attackers and defenders and maladaptive punishment patterns disappeared. Results suggest that intergroup conflict undermines past perpetrators’ legitimacy to enforce cooperation norms. More generally, results reveal that past conflict can reduce the effectiveness of institutions for managing the commons.

Highlights

• Intergroup conflict reduces the effectiveness of peer punishment to promote cooperation.

• Previous attackers lose their legitimacy to enforce cooperation norms.

• Hiding previous conflict roles allows to re-establish group cooperation.

From the Discussion

Across all treatments, we observed that groups with a shadow of conflict earned progressively less and, hence, benefitted less from the cooperation opportunities they had after the conflict episode compared to groups without a previous intergroup conflict (control treatment) and groups in which previous conflict roles were hidden (reset treatment). By analyzing the patterns of punishment, we found that groups that experienced a shadow of conflict did not punish free-riders as harshly compared to the other treatments. Further, punishment by past attackers was less effective in inducing subsequent cooperation, suggesting that attackers lose their legitimacy to enforce norms of cooperation when their past role in the conflict is identifiable (see also Baldassarri and Grossman, 2011, Faillo et al., 2013, Gross et al., 2016 for related findings on the role of legitimacy for the effectiveness of punishment in non-conflict settings). Even previous attackers did not significantly change their subsequent cooperation when having received punishment by their fellow, previous attacker. Hiding previous group affiliations, instead, made punishment by previous attackers as effective in promoting cooperation as in the control treatment.

These results reveal an important boundary condition for peer punishment institutions. While many experiments have shown that peer punishment can stabilize cooperation in groups (Fehr and Gächter, 2000, Masclet et al., 2003, Yamagishi, 1986), other research also showed that peer punishment can be misused or underused and is not always aimed at free-riders. In such cases, the ability to punish group members can have detrimental consequences for cooperation and group earnings (Abbink et al., 2017, Engelmann and Nikiforakis, 2015, Herrmann et al., 2008, Nikiforakis, 2008).

The research is here.

Tech firms are making computer chips with human cells – is it ethical?

J. Savulescu, C. Gyngell, & T. Sawai

The Conversation

Originally published 24 MAY 22

Here is an excerpt:

While silicon computers transformed society, they are still outmatched by the brains of most animals. For example, a cat’s brain contains 1,000 times more data storage than an average iPad and can use this information a million times faster. The human brain, with its trillion neural connections, is capable of making 15 quintillion operations per second.

This can only be matched today by massive supercomputers using vast amounts of energy. The human brain only uses about 20 watts of energy, or about the same as it takes to power a lightbulb. It would take 34 coal-powered plants generating 500 megawatts per hour to store the same amount of data contained in one human brain in modern data storage centres.

Companies do not need brain tissue samples from donors, but can simply grow the neurons they need in the lab from ordinary skin cells using stem cell technologies. Scientists can engineer cells from blood samples or skin biopsies into a type of stem cell that can then become any cell type in the human body.

However, this raises questions about donor consent. Do people who provide tissue samples for technology research and development know that it might be used to make neural computers? Do they need to know this for their consent to be valid?

People will no doubt be much more willing to donate skin cells for research than their brain tissue. One of the barriers to brain donation is that the brain is seen as linked to your identity. But in a world where we can grow mini-brains from virtually any cell type, does it make sense to draw this type of distinction?

If neural computers become common, we will grapple with other tissue donation issues. In Cortical Lab’s research with Dishbrain, they found human neurons were faster at learning than neurons from mice. Might there also be differences in performance depending on whose neurons are used? Might Apple and Google be able to make lightning-fast computers using neurons from our best and brightest today? Would someone be able to secure tissues from deceased genius’s like Albert Einstein to make specialised limited-edition neural computers?

Such questions are highly speculative but touch on broader themes of exploitation and compensation. Consider the scandal regarding Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman whose cells were used extensively in medical and commercial research without her knowledge and consent.

Henrietta’s cells are still used in applications which generate huge amounts of revenue for pharmaceutical companies (including recently to develop COVID vaccines. The Lacks family still has not received any compensation. If a donor’s neurons end up being used in products like the imaginary Nyooro, should they be entitled to some of the profit made from those products?

The article is here.