Episodes

Given the temptations around each one of us in the world and the decisions we need to make in our lives about what paths to take regarding future events it might at least be worthwhile to try to get a better understanding of risk, and so in episode 30 I wanted to do a deep dive on exactly that–the history of and just what do we mean by risk. We’ll do this by diving into the book Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, written by Peter Bernstein.

• Get the book: Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter Bernstein

In Episode 29 we focus on the issues with the software engineering people, practices, and technologies currently used to create flawed machine learning and artificial intelligence systems. We’ll do this by doing a deep dive into the book Responsible Machine Learning by Patrick Hall, Navdeep Gill, and Benjamin Cox.

In Episode 28 we’ll be looking at what philosopher Luciano Floridi calls the “infosphere”. You may have heard of the “biosphere”–all the ecosystems on earth that support biological life. The infosphere then is the environment that supports information, which is another term for reality, if you look at today’s reality from an informational perspective. Thus, in The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality we’ll investigate how ICTs (information and computing technologies) are blurring our online and offline worlds.

• Get the book: The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality by Luciano Floridi.

In Episode 27 we will try to better understand the importance of the metaphysics for the statistics we use to power our machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms by doing a deep dive on the book Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, and the Logic of Capitalism by Justin Joque.

• Get the book: Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, and the Logic of Capitalism by Justin Joque.

In Episode 26 we will do a deep dive into Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting by Shannon Vallor. This book is an expansion on the ideas she developed in her article “Moral Deskilling and Upskilling in a New Machine Age: Reflections on the Ambiguous Future of Character” that we explored back in Episode 7. This book argues the importance of virtue ethics as a framework to live the good life, then establishes a set of technomoral virtues to help us live the good life in today’s technology-saturated world.

• Get the book: Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting by Shannon Vallor.

For our first deep dive in our spring series we’ll tackle The Nature of Technological Knowledge. Are Models of Scientific Change Relevant?, edited by Rachel Laudan.

• Get the book: The Nature of Technological Knowledge. Are Models of Scientific Change Relevant? edited by Rachel Laudan.