Text, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll: Tethics 2023 and beyond

Well, that’s it for Tethics 2023! I find myself struggling to accept that this was only the second “proper” one I’ve attended: my first one, in 2020, was an all-online event (for obvious reasons), and in 2022 there was no Tethics because Turku was hosting Ethicomp instead. Despite all that, I want to say that I’ve been going to the conference for years, because it just feels right somehow. I suppose you could take it as a testament to the cosy and welcoming atmosphere of the conference that I feel so at home there.

Certainly there’s something to be said for a conference where you can realistically exchange at least a few words with every fellow delegate over the course of a couple of days. (Not that I ever actually do, mingling not being my strongest suit, but in principle I could have.) I’m pretty sure I’ve commented before on the cultural differences I’ve observed between technical and philosophical conferences, but it’s worth reiterating how much more rewarding it is to attend a conference when there’s a genuine and lively discussion about every presentation. Out of all the conferences I’ve ever been to, Tethics is actually a strong candidate for being closest to ideal in that besides having that culture of debate, it’s small enough that you can fit everyone in a regular-sized classroom, and there are people there representing different disciplines and sectors so you get a nice range of diverse viewpoints in the discussion.

The keynote address of the conference was delivered by Olivia Gambelin, founder and CEO of an AI ethics consulting company called Ethical Intelligence. I very much enjoyed her talk, which dealt with the differences between risk-oriented and innovation-oriented approaches to AI ethics and how it’s not about choosing one or the other but about finding the right balance between the two. I particularly liked her characterisation of the traits of ethical AI systems – fairness, transparency etc. – as AI virtues, and the idea that good AI (or indeed any good technology) should, above all, boost human virtues as opposed to capitalising on our vices. My inner cynic can’t help but wonder if there’s enough money in that for virtuous AI to become mainstream, but I’m not ready to give up on humanity just yet.

Among the regular presentations, there were also several that were somehow related to AI ethics, which I of course appreciated, since I’m always on the lookout for new ideas and perspectives in that area. However, the two that most caught my attention were actually both in the category of “now for something completely different”. On the first day, Ville Malinen spoke on the sustainability and public image of sim racing, which occupies its own little niche in the world of sports, related to but distinct from both real-world motor racing and other esports. On the second day, in the last session I was able to attend before I had to go catch my train home, J. Tuomas Harviainen presented a fascinating – as well as rather surprising – case where he and his colleagues had received a dataset of some three million posts from a dark web drug marketplace and faced the problem of how to anonymise it so that it could be safely archived in a research data repository.

Another highlight was my own paper – and I can say this with at least some degree of objectivity, since my own involvement in both the writing and the presentation was relatively small. Taylor Richmond, who was my master’s student and also worked as my assistant for a while, wrote the manuscript at my suggestion, based on the research she did for her M.Sc. thesis. She then got and accepted a job offer from industry, and I figured that it would be up to me to present the paper at the conference, but to my delight and surprise, she insisted on going there to present it herself, even at her own expense. I offered some advice on how to prepare the presentation and some feedback on her slides, but all of the real work was done by her, leaving me free to enjoy the most low-stress conference I’ve ever attended.

The paper itself explores content feed swapping as a potential way of mitigating the harmful effects of filter bubbles on social media platforms. Taylor proposed a concept where a user can click a button to temporarily switch to seeing the feed of the user with the least similar preferences to theirs, exposing them to a radically different view of the world. To test the concept, she carried out an experiment where ten volunteers spent some time browsing a simulated social media platform and answered a survey. The results showed that the feed swap increased the users’ awareness of bias without having a negative impact on their engagement, the latter being a rather crucial consideration if real-world social media companies are to even consider adding such a functionality to their applications. Despite some obvious limitations, it was a seriously impressive effort, as noted by several conference delegates besides me: she designed the experiment, created the social media simulation and analysed the data all by herself, and she did a fine job with the presentation as well. My own contribution, apart from my supervisory role, was basically that I wrote some framing text to help sell the subject matter of the paper to the tech ethics crowd.

Also on the agenda this year was a special session on the future of the Tethics conference. The Future Ethics research group at the Turku School of Economics, which has organised every event so far, is apparently not in a position to commit to doing it again next year, so there was a discussion on finding an alternative host, with Tampere University emerging as the most likely candidate. As much as I’ve enjoyed all of my visits to Turku, I’d certainly appreciate the two hours that this would slice off my one-way travel time! There was also some talk about possibly going more international – attracting more participants from outside the Nordic countries, perhaps hosting the conference outside Finland at some point in the future – but there was a general consensus that in any case the event should remain relatively small and affordable to retain its essence. Personally, I quite like the idea that Oulu could be the host some year, although I don’t know how many others there are here who’d be on board with that.

In the meantime, my top two professional priorities right now are getting more focused on research (with a whole bunch of distractions now happily out of the way) and finishing my university pedagogy studies. It might seem like these are more or less diametrically opposed to one another, but thankfully that’s not the case: I can see potential in both of the remaining courses – teaching practice and research-based teacherhood – for advancing my research interests as well as my pedagogical knowledge. I have a couple of journal manuscripts in the works, one recently submitted and the other undergoing revisions, and I’m involved in a cybersecurity-themed research project where I’ve been looking into AI vulnerabilities from an AI ethics perspective. I’m sure the next distraction is waiting to pounce on me just around the corner, but until it does, I’m going to indulge myself and pretend that I have no work duties other than thinking deep thoughts and making sense of the world.

As usual, there are things happening on the music front as well. The choir currently has its sights set firmly on two big Christmastime projects, but there’s been time for a variety of smaller performances too; a particularly memorable occasion was singing Sogno di Volare, the theme song of the video game Civilization VI, as the recessional music at the wedding ceremony of two choir members. Next year we’ll have the choir’s own 45^th anniversary celebrations – and, of course, the new run of The Magic Flute! The first music rehearsal for the latter is scheduled to take place just a couple of weeks from now. Will be interesting to see how much of the music we can still remember, although the real challenge will come in December when we start relearning the choreographies…

Pictures and sounds

A new cinema club kicked off at the university yesterday with a screening of the 2014 film Ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland. Domhnall Gleeson stars as Caleb, a programmer working for a company called Blue Book – basically a stand-in for Google – who wins a competition and gets invited to spend a week with Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the company CEO, at his place in the mountains. Soon after Caleb’s arrival, it turns out that the real reason for him being there is Ava (Alicia Vikander), a revolutionary humanoid robot Nathan’s been developing in secrecy. Nathan wants Caleb to subject Ava to the ultimate version of the Turing Test: interact with her to determine if she’s truly intelligent, sentient and self-aware on a human level.

I was initially a little bit annoyed at how the film exaggerates the significance of the Turing Test, as if there is some kind of fundamental qualitative distinction between an entity that beats the test and one that doesn’t, but that soon stopped bothering me after the film moved on to more interesting things. The usual annoyances related to the representation of technology in mainstream cinema are also there – empty technobabble, Hollywood hacking – but these are kept to a minimum and equally easy to forgive. At one point Nathan stops Caleb when the latter is trying to ask technical questions about Ava’s AI, which I felt was the author speaking to the audience as much as Nathan to Caleb: never mind how it’s supposed to work, we’re here to talk philosophy.

Such petty complaints were certainly not enough to prevent me from thoroughly enjoying the movie, and I must say I’m rather surprised I hadn’t seen it before or even been aware it existed. The discussion afterward was highly stimulating as well; because of my interest in AI ethics, I’d been invited to join it in the capacity of moderator, but this was more of a nominal role and what I really did was give my views on a couple of questions from the organisers to get the conversation started. All the big philosophical issues related to AI came up – the nature of consciousness, rights of artificial entities, AI alignment, the singularity, AI as an existential threat. Time well spent! The club nights are always on a Thursday, which I ordinarily keep reserved for band rehearsal, but I like the concept and there are interesting films coming up (including one I haven’t seen before), so I’m tempted to go again.

Meanwhile in the world of non-fictional AI, I’ve managed to keep myself appropriately busy for the past few weeks that I’ve been back at work, largely thanks to my AI ethics course and various things derived from it: analysing the course feedback from last spring, giving some lectures for a summer school in learning analytics, finishing two online courses due to be launched soon. The feedback was particularly nice this time – every student who answered the survey gave the course the highest possible overall grade, and in general there was a clear shift towards more favourable answers from last year. Granted, there were only six responses, but that’s still a third of all the students who completed the course this year, and both the completion rate and the absolute number of students who completed were the highest so far. Combined with my personal experience, it all makes me quite confident that I’m headed in the right direction with the course.

The choir is also back from its summer break, with a new musical director. We had our first rehearsal of the new term last week, and there are several small performances coming up already in the next couple of weeks, although I’m going to miss most of them because I’ll be away on a trip. During the summer some of us (myself included) participated in the creation of Owla, a new installation by sound artist Jaakko Autio, and a most interesting and rewarding experience it was. First we rehearsed and recorded a piece of music composed specifically for this occasion by a friend of the artist, and during the process Jaakko captured not just the music but also all the chatter in between takes. Once we were happy with the song, we sat down, still mic’d up, and Jaakko asked us some interview questions, had us introduce each other and finally just breathe for a few minutes. All of this audio became raw material for the installation, which opened at the Oulu Museum of Art on Wednesday, so go check it out if you’re in town!

Still alive

I am indeed! Barely, but still. Once again blogging has been forced to take a back seat, but I thought I should do one more post before my vacation – which, happily, is right around the corner. No big deadlines before that, just some exam marking plus a bunch of writing that I can pick up from where I left off when I come back to work in August. Next week will be more like a half week because of the faculty’s staff summer party and the Midsummer weekend, and after that there’s just one week of work left before I’m free. Seems too good to be true!

The AI ethics course is happily finished by now: lectures given, assignments evaluated, grades entered into Peppi. Again, it was a lot of work, but also rewarding and enjoyable. There are always at least a couple of students who really shine, turning in excellent assignment submission after another, and those alone are enough to make it all worthwhile. However, a big part of the enjoyment is also that I can use the course as a test lab of sorts, changing things a bit and trying something new each time, seeing what works and what doesn’t. This time I made some changes to the assessment criteria and practices, which seemed to work, so I think I’ll continue in the same direction next year with the teaching development project that I need to do as part of my university pedagogy studies.

Of course, there’s always new things happening in the world of AI, so the course contents also need some updating each year. This spring, for obvious reasons, the ethical implications of generative AI tools kept popping up under various course themes, and I also encouraged the students to try ChatGPT or some other such tool at least once to generate text for their assignment submissions. There were certain rules, of course: I told the students that they must document their use of AI, critically examine the AI outputs and take responsibility for everything they submit, including any factual errors or other flaws in AI-generated text. The results of the experiment were a bit of a mixed bag, but at any rate there were some lessons learned, for myself and hopefully for the students as well. If you won’t trust students to use AI ethically on an AI ethics course, where then?

The most recent big news related to AI ethics is that the European Parliament voted this week to adopt its position on the upcoming AI Act, so the regulation is moving forward and it may well be that on next year’s course we will be able to tell the students what it looks like in its final form. The parliament appears to have made some substantial changes to the bill, expanding the lists of prohibited and high-risk applications and specifying obligations for general-purpose AI systems while making exemptions for R&D so as not to stifle innovation. It will be extremely interesting to see what the impact of the act will be – on AI development and use, of course, but also on AI regulation elsewhere in the world, since this is very much a pioneering effort globally.

After my summer holiday I’ll need to hit the ground running, because I’m once again giving some AI ethics lectures as part of a learning analytics summer school. A new thing this year is that I’m also preparing an ethics module for a new Master’s programme in sustainable autonomous systems, a collaboration between my university and the University of Vaasa. I don’t mind the new challenge at all – I took it upon myself more or less voluntarily, after all – but it does mean that my job title is increasingly at odds with what I actually do. Still, I’ve managed to fit in some research as well, and starting in the autumn I’ll even be participating in a proper research project for a change.

One of the highlights of the spring is that I got a paper accepted to Tethics 2023 – or rather, I supervised a student who got a paper accepted, which feels at least as rewarding as if I’d done the research myself, if not more so. In any case, it looks like I’ll be visiting Turku for an ethics conference for the third year running, and I really wouldn’t mind if this became a tradition! I’m even looking forward to the networking aspect, which I’m usually pretty bad at. Somehow ethics conference are different and Tethics especially – partially because it’s so small, I suppose, but perhaps also because these people are my tribe?

Musically, the spring term was very successful. After The Magic Flute we appeared in two concerts with Oulu Sinfonia – one of them sold out – performing music by the late great Ennio Morricone. Sadly, we then parted ways with our musical director of many years, which forced some planned events to be cancelled / postponed / scaled down, but everyone seems determined to keep the motor running and overall I feel pretty good about the future of the choir. There will be some big things happening late this year and early the next, including (but not limited to) another run of the opera in January and February. Three out of eleven shows are sold out already, so if you missed it this year, get your ticket now!

The final curtain

Happy 2023, I guess? I know it’s a bit ridiculous to be wishing that when we’re more than halfway into February already, but it is my first blog post of the year – I checked. In my defence, the beginning of the year has been pretty much exactly as intense as I feared it would be, with me trying my best to balance between my commitments to the university and the theatre. The first week of January was the absolute worst: I returned to work immediately after New Year, and that week we had rehearsals every night from Monday to Thursday. I was still suffering from the problem of sleeping badly after them, so the inevitable result was me being utterly knackered by Friday, which fortunately was a bank holiday, giving me a chance to recover before two more rehearsals on Saturday.

The following week we had dress rehearsals from Monday to Wednesday, Thursday night off and then the first two performances on Friday and Saturday. In terms of effort, it was hardly any easier than the previous week, but the thrill of the opening night more than made up for it all. After the first show we celebrated with some bubbly and they even gave flowers to all of us chorus members; sadly, mine suffered rather heavy damage on the way home, which involved a pit stop in a crowded bar that I ended up leaving before I even had a chance to order myself a drink, but I was able to salvage the essential part of the poor abused plant and keep it looking nice for a good week.

After opening week, things got considerably less hectic, since there were no more rehearsals, just performances – first three per week, then down to two for the last couple of weeks. This weekend’s the final one, so around 4pm on Saturday the curtain will close on our production of The Magic Flute for the last time. All 15 performances sold out, and all the reviews I’ve seen have been very positive, so I guess it’s safe to say we’ve had a successful run! It’s been a wonderful experience for me personally as well, but I can’t deny that toward the end it has begun to feel more and more like work that I’m not getting paid for and that has made me put my other hobbies (not to mention my social life) largely on hold for quite a while. I’m very much looking forward to next Friday and my first commitment-free weekend of the year.

The big thing at work right now is evaluating applications to international M.Sc. degree programmes. This is the first time I’m involved in the process, and boy is it a trudge and a half. Sure, it’s interesting to get a sneak peek at some of the new students who may be joining us from around the world next autumn, but the work itself is first tedious, crawling through the mass of application documents to identify the most promising candidates, and then stress-inducing, doing interviews with each of them. I recently had a chat about this with a friend of mine who’s been in the IT consulting business for many years and interviewed his share of job applicants, and he said he finds interviews stressful because he can tell that the other person is nervous, so then he empathises with them and starts to feel their discomfort. Me being me, I get stressed about talking to new people even without that extra factor, so I’m going to be extremely glad once I’m done with my share of the interviews.

Something that’s turned out to be a blessing here is the Bookings app in Microsoft 365. This has been very helpful in scheduling the interviews: you just specify the times when you are available, make sure your calendar is up to date with your other appointments so you don’t get double bookings, and then send a link to the booking page to the people you want to invite and let them pick a time that works for them. Apparently in the past this has been done by tentatively selecting a date and time for each candidate, emailing it to them and asking them to email back with suggestions if the proposed time doesn’t suit them; I certainly don’t relish the idea of having that kind of administrative overhead on top of the actual evaluation work, even though it might have helped get the interviews spaced out more evenly and efficiently.

As usual, there’s no need to worry about running out of work to do in the spring either: the start of period IV is just three full weeks away, and with that comes the start of another run of the AI ethics course. I’ll count myself lucky if it doesn’t take up even more of my time than before; I’m the sole responsible teacher now, but on the other hand I will have a teaching assistant, and I also have some ideas for streamlining the evaluation of course assignments to make it less of a burden. Another thing to think about is my stance on ChatGPT and its ilk; certainly I’m going to discuss the technology and its implications in my lectures, but I’ll also need to decide what to do about the possibility of students using it to generate text for their assignment submissions. I’m leaning toward embracing it rather than discouraging or outright banning it – I don’t know how I’d enforce such a ban anyway – but if I go there, it’s not exactly trivial to come up with assignments that give everyone an equal opportunity to exploit the technology and demonstrate their learning to me.

Here be dragons

Well what do you know – it’s December already! A year of returning to a normal of sorts, at least as far as COVID is concerned, coming to an end. For me, “normal” now means working on campus a couple of days a week on average, generally on days when I don’t have any online meetings, since I find it the most convenient to do those at home. We also coordinate within the research group so that there will usually be a few of us there at the same time so we can have lunch and coffee together. The most “old normal” thing I’ve done this year was giving a gool old-fashioned lecture in a lecture hall, the first one since 2019 – and that was in Dublin, so the last pre-pandemic one I gave in Oulu must have been in 2017. I went to the auditorium half an hour in advance just to be sure to avoid any delays due to me being out of touch with the latest presentation technology, but the hardest part turned out to be finding the light switch!

The end of the year has been heavily dominated by teaching-related tasks. There’s the usual avalanche of exams to be marked – a routine that never seems to get any less tedious, but at least it’s something useful to do when I’m not feeling creative enough for anything else. On top of that I’m currently involved in not one but two adult education projects where the university is offering companies training on AI-related topics. One of the topics covered is AI ethics, and recently I’ve been working on creating a new fully automated online course based on the syllabus of the lecture course, which is an interesting challenge, since it’s not exactly trivial to come up with genuinely meaningful ethics assignments where the answer can be checked by an algorithm. Making the course content relevant to the target audience is another challenge, and I’m hoping that people from a variety of companies will not only complete the course but leave some feedback as well.

Meanwhile in the world of music, rehearsals for The Magic Flute kicked off for real last week, and this week we already did a run-through of the first act in its entirety. I have no idea how these things usually work, but I feel like it went quite well, given how quickly we got to that point. From my point of view, the bit that needs the most work is what happens during the overture and the first scene; without giving away too much of what’s to come, I can say that there’s a dragon terrorising the hero, which involves most of the male chorus (myself included) executing a choreographed routine that, for a bunch of untrained amateurs, is certainly enough of a challenge to learn alongside the parts we actually signed up for. One of us hadn’t even had a chance to see the choreography in action before the run-through, so it was inevitably a mess, but we have time booked later for sorting it out.

So far the experience has been slightly bewildering, but above all interesting and rewarding. I guess I was expecting – rather naively, in retrospect – that the details of the production would be all figured out before the start of rehearsals and we’d be told exactly what to do on stage, but that’s not how it works at all. The director gives us the broad strokes, but the finer points are largely made up as we go along, and it often involves a fair bit of improv, also from us extras. It feels great to be included in the creative process like that, and somehow quite natural too, there’s hardly any of the self-consciousness that I’d normally expect to feel when thrown into a situation like that. Although the “characters” that I get to play are essentially just part of the background, I’m doing my best to come up with little things of my own that I can do to breathe life into them. Singing, dancing and acting – I’m a regular triple threat, me!

Another curious thing is that rather than tired, I’ve been feeling strangely invigorated after the rehearsals, presumably because of the mental stimulation. The downside is that it takes a while afterward to wind down properly, and since the rehearsals are in the evening, I’ve found it completely impossible to fall asleep until well after midnight. With daytime length down to four and a half hours and still diminishing, this time of year is exhausting enough without sleep deprivation, so I hope the novelty will wear off soon and I’ll start feeling ready to hit the sack as soon as I get home from the theatre. If not, at least we’ll break for Christmas and New Year before things get seriously hectic in preparation for the opening night.

London calling

Last week I submitted my application for an Academy Research Fellowship to the September call of the Academy of Finland, joining 1028 other hopefuls. That’s right, 1029 applications received according to the AoF Twitter account. I guess it’s safe to say that it’s going to be a tight sieve once again, and my expectations are at about the same level as always. (Not high, in case that was unclear.) I did come up with what I feel is a basically fundable research idea and plan, but the hard part is selling it, and yourself as the right person for the job, to the reviewers. Still, this is the last time I’m eligible for this funding instrument – technically the only time, since the new Research Fellowship has replaced the old Postdoctoral Researcher and Research Fellow instruments – so I figured I’d give it one last shot. Worst case scenario, the reviewers absolutely demolish my proposal but that still leaves me with a foundation to build on.

September tends to be one of the most taxing months of the year, and this year was no exception; if anything, this one was a whopper even by September standards. The AoF call was there as usual, as was the start of teaching with Towards Data Mining being lectured in the first period, but all sorts of other stuff had somehow piled up on top of those. Navigating this ocean of demands on my time and energy was quite an exercise in prioritisation. On the whole, I think I managed to handle it reasonably well, but I can’t entirely shake the feeling that there’s something I’ve neglected that will come and bite me in the bum later.

I have to admit that I probably made things worse for myself by going off gallivanting in and near London just before the start of September, but it was a brilliant trip that I’d been looking forward to for almost three years, so I have no regrets. This was my first time visiting London, so there were lots of things to see, and see things I most certainly did. After six nights in London I took a train to Aylesbury, where I saw my favourite band make a triumphant return to the stage after a series of setbacks, including an extremely traumatic one that could easily have ended their story altogether. The night after the concert I spent in Aylesbury, and the following day it was back to London, Heathrow and eventually home for me.

When I originally started planning the trip, I conceived it as a sort of science/technology-themed pilgrimage, and I managed to fit in several attractions related to that theme: the Natural History Museum, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley with its collection of vintage hardware going all the way back to (rebuilds of) the machines used by Allied codebreakers – among them a certain A. Turing – to decipher German messages during WW2. Westminster Abbey, with all the famous scientists buried or memorialised there, counts as well. Oxford I had to leave for another time, along with the Brunel Museum, which was a bit of a shame since the band I went to see has a connection with Isambard Kingdom Brunel through one of their songs, so a visit to the museum would have tied the trip neatly together. (For the music geeks out there: the song is called The Underfall Yard, the band is called Big Big Train – if you’re into prog rock and aren’t familiar with this group yet, do yourself a favour and check it out.)

Speaking of music, things have been pretty intense on the choral front as well. In barely more than a week we’re due to perform three concerts together with the Musta lammas choir from Helsinki, something we’ve been looking forward to for a long time since the two previous attempts got cancelled because of covid restrictions. We’ll be singing everything from memory, which must be fun for the new singers who auditioned in September and have been in the choir for about two weeks! Choir rehearsals for The Magic Flute started this week, so that’s more stuff to memorise for November when we start rehearsing what we’re going to do on stage. The latter is what I’m mainly nervous about – learning and singing music is entirely within my comfort zone, but I presume that in the opera production even the choir work will involve some acting, and that’s a new thing for me.

Another interesting new development is that I’m now a student at the university! Okay, that’s not exactly new as such, but it’s been a good while since I last was one officially, with a student number and everything. I’m not going for a whole new degree, but I’m continuing my university pedagogy studies from the previous academic year in a programme consisting of three courses for a total of 25 ECTS credits. It’s apparently a lot of work, but during the first year I get to skip some of the course meetings and assignments since I’ve done the introductory course. I intend to continue developing the AI ethics course, for which it looks like I’ll be assuming more responsibility in the future, and I also want to do more research on AI ethics education; hopefully the pedagogy studies will help in both these pursuits.

“It belongs in a museum!”

After a three-week summer holiday, I returned to work last Monday. I say “returned to work”, but what I actually did was hop on a train and travel to Turku to attend the Ethicomp 2022 conference at the School of Economics. After two and a half days of hard conferencing, I departed for Oulu on Thursday afternoon, leaving only Friday as a “normal” workday before the weekend. I can imagine, and have in fact experienced, much worse ways to come back after a vacation!

I felt more anxious than usual about my own presentation, scheduled for late afternoon on the first day. This was partially because I like to prepare and rehearse my presentations well in advance, but this time I hadn’t had time to finish my slides before my vacation nor an inclination to work on them during it, so I more or less put my deck together on the train and then rehearsed the talk in my hotel room. On Tuesday I skipped the session immediately before mine to flick through my slides a few more times and make some last-minute tweaks, and I eventually emerged from my mental cocoon reasonably confident that I would get through the whole thing without stumbling.

I still wasn’t that confident about how the presentation would be received, because the paper I was presenting is probably the strangest one I’ve written to date. Long story short, one day I was preparing materials for the introductory lecture of the AI ethics course and explaining the concepts of moral agency (the status of having moral obligations) and patiency (the status of being the subject of moral concerns). Artificial things are traditionally excluded from both categories, but there is an ongoing debate in philosophy of AI about whether a sufficiently advanced AI system could qualify as a moral agent and/or patient.

The idea that struck me was that if we let go of (organic) life as an analogy and view AI systems as cultural artifacts instead, we can sidestep the whole debate on whether AI can become sentient/conscious/whatever and make the moral patiency question a good deal more relevant to practical AI ethics in the here and now. After all, many people feel sad when an artifact of great cultural significance is destroyed (think Notre-Dame de Paris), and downright outraged if the destruction is wilful (think the Buddhas of Bamiyan), so it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to argue that such artifacts have at least something closely related to moral patiency. Could an AI system also qualify as such an artifact? I filed the question in my brain under “ideas to come back to at an opportune moment”.

The moment came in January: I wasn’t terribly busy with anything else right after the holidays, Ethicomp had a call for papers open and I only needed to write a 1500-word extended abstract to pitch my idea. I did wonder if it might be a bit too outlandish, which in retrospect was silly of me, I suppose – philosophers love outlandish ideas! The reviews were in fact fairly enthusiastic, and in the end my presentation at the conference was also well received. I was able to have some fun with it even, which is not something I often manage with my conference talks, and I soon got over my nagging feeling of being an impostor, a lowly computer scientist who arrogantly thinks he’s qualified to talk philosophy.

In retrospect, I also have to say I did manage to turn that extended abstract into a pretty well written full paper! It’s not officially published yet, but it argues that 1) yes, AI systems can be artifacts of considerable cultural significance and therefore intrinsically worthy of preservation, 2) they constitute a category of artifact that cannot be subsumed under a broader category without losing essential information about their special nature, and 3) this special nature should be taken into account when deciding how to preserve them. The argumentation is fairly informal, relying largely on intuition and analogy, but I’m quite proud of the way it’s built and presented nonetheless. Sure, the paper is only tangentially related to my daily work and is likely to be a total one-off, but even the one-offs can sometimes have a bigger impact than you’d expect – there’s another one of mine, also an ethics paper, that was published 15 years ago but is still getting citations.

Apart from surviving my own presentation, for me the highlight of the first day, and indeed the whole conference, was the keynote Scaling Responsible Innovation by Johnny Søraker. I’d met Johnny before on a couple of occasions, originally at the ECAP 2006 conference in Trondheim where he was one of the organisers, but hadn’t seen him for ages. Turns out he’s now working as an AI ethicist for Google, which the more cynically minded among us might remark sounds like a contradiction in terms, but be that as it may, he gave an insightful and entertaining talk on the challenges faced by SMEs wanting to do responsible innovation and how they can address those challenges. I particularly liked the idea of having an “interrupt”: someone who is kept informed of everything going on in the company and has been trained to spot potential ethics issues. The obvious advantage is that it doesn’t matter how convoluted or ad-hoc the innovation process is – as long as there is this one node through which everything passes at some point, risks can be identified at that point and brought to the attention of someone qualified to make decisions on how to mitigate them.

Among the regular presentations there were several AI-related ones that I found very interesting. The one that resonated with me the most was Sara Blanco’s talk, in which she criticised what might be called a naive, “one-size-fits-all” conception of AI explainability and argued for a more nuanced one that acknowledges the need to account for differences in background knowledge and prior beliefs in the formulation of explanations. In light of my recent exposure to constructivist theories of learning, which likewise emphasise the effect of the learner’s existing knowledge structures on the process of integrating new knowledge into those structures, this made a great deal of sense to me. Outside the realm of AI, I very much enjoyed Reuben Kirkham’s talk on the impact on academic freedom of the unusual relationship between academia and industry in computer science, as well as Michael Kirkpatrick’s on the problematic nature of direct-to-consumer genomic testing services such as 23andMe, something I’ve brought up myself in my data ethics lectures.

The social programme was top notch too. On Wednesday evening we were first treated to a glass of sparkling and some live classical music at the Sibelius Museum, where we had about an hour to roam and explore the collections, which even included some instruments for visitors to try out – I couldn’t resist having a go on the Hammond organ, of course. After this we enjoyed a very tasty three-course dinner, with more live music, at restaurant Grädda next door. From the restaurant we proceeded to a pub for more drinks and chats, and when the pub closed, some of my fellow delegates went to find another one to have a nightcap in, but by that point I was quite ready for bed myself so I headed straight to my hotel.

This was my first Ethicomp conference, but I certainly hope it wasn’t my last. I’ve always found philosophy conferences highly stimulating, as well as welcoming to people of diverse academic backgrounds, so despite my anxieties, me not being a “proper” philosopher has never been a real issue. After CEPE 2009 I more or less lost touch with the tech ethics community for a whole decade, but recently I’ve been sort of working my way back in: first there was the special session at IEEE CEC 2019, then Tethics 2021, and now this. Ethicomp in particular is apparently the one that everyone in the ethics of computing community wants to go to, and having now been there myself, I can see why. The next one will be in 2024, so I guess I have about a year and a half to come up with another weird-but-compelling idea?

A storm of swords

The 11th Doctoral Conferment Ceremony of the University of Oulu was celebrated over the past weekend with all the traditional festivities: the sword-whetting on Friday, the ceremony proper on Saturday followed by a procession through city centre, an ecumenical service in Oulu Cathedral and the conferment banquet and ball, and finally the “sailing trip” (which, I am given to understand, involves rowing but no actual sailing) on Sunday. This is a special year for the University of Oulu in that it’s been exactly 50 years since the university’s first conferment ceremony in 1972, which means that its very first Jubilee Doctors were now celebrated in addition to the usual young doctors and honorary doctors. I had my own doctorate conferred on me in the previous ceremony in 2017, so I have quite a lot of living to do before I get to be a Jubilee Doctor, but in this day and age, with the wonders of modern healthcare, there’s a decent chance that I’ll make it.

Helsingin Sanomat ran a column about the Finnish conferment tradition a couple of weeks ago; the piece is in Finnish only, but the gist of it is that although the whole spectacle is a pretty incomprehensible ritual, we need rituals like that in our lives. Indeed, the conferment ceremony is just that, a ritual: you’re every bit as much a doctor regardless of whether you’ve attended the celebrations. The tradition traces its roots back to Medieval times, and I presume that originally the conferment ceremony would have been where you officially received your degree, but these days graduation and conferment are two distinct events and the latter doesn’t really serve any official function. Technically it’s only after conferment that you’re entitled to carry the symbols of the doctoral degree – the hat and the sword – but there are relatively few occasions where you get to wear the hat, extremely few where you get to wear the sword, and anyway, it’s not like you’re going to get arrested for wearing them “without permission”.

Ah yes, the hat and the sword. This particular bit of Finnish academic tradition tends to arouse a fair deal of curiosity in non-Finns, especially the sword part. Surprisingly many people I’ve met abroad have known about it, although there is a common misconception that “in Finland, when you get your PhD, you get a sword”, which I have disappointingly had to correct by telling them that 1) you have to wait until conferment, and 2) you have to pay for the hat and the sword yourself. The two together cost upwards of a thousand euros, and on top of that come the costs of attending the celebrations. You can choose to participate in only some of them – I skipped the sailing trip myself – or even none of them, but even just having your degree conferred in absentia costs a nontrivial amount of money.

Despite the required expenditure and the seemingly absurd nature of the conferment ceremony, it remains a popular event among new doctors and I certainly have no regrets about splurging on mine five years ago. This year I participated in a different role, singing with the choir in the ceremony proper and the church service. The ceremony was a somewhat strange experience in that we were providing background music and therefore trying to attract as little attention as possible to ourselves, the opposite of what we would normally aim for when performing to an audience. We were instructed beforehand that we should not at any point sing louder than mezzo-piano, which is not that easy to achieve with high notes – you can do those quietly, or you can do them well, but you can’t have it both ways.

In the cathedral we did not have to restrain ourselves and could use the acoustics to full effect. We sang two choral songs by Oulu-born composer Leevi Madetoja and joined the congregation in singing two hymns, including the much-loved Suvivirsi. A staple of Finnish end-of-school-year celebrations, I’ve sung it many times, but never quite the way we did it this time: each of the three verses was in a different language, the first one in Finnish, the second in Swedish and the third in Northern Sami. This brings the total number of languages I’ve sung in during my first year in the choir to eleven! The Orthodox cathedral choir also performed, sounding appropriately angelic, but to me the real star of the show was the organist, who had to keep playing music while the procession of academics walked into the church and then again while they walked out. Both operations took quite a while to complete, but the organist delivered, and we had the best seats in the house, with the massive organ pipes right behind us and the man himself in front of us. We had to suppress our desire to applaud and cheer him, but we did our best to express in other ways how much we loved his playing, and he was clearly delighted to have such an appreciative audience with him in the organ loft.

Today I have an appointment with the costume department of Oulu Theatre to have my measures taken for The Magic Flute; incidentally, this will be the first time I’m having clothes tailor-made for me, apart from my doctoral hat! The last rehearsal of the choir term is this week, the end-of-term party in mid-June, and then we’re off to summer hols as far as choir business is concerned. My actual summer holiday is not that far away either: five weeks of work – a time that somehow manages to feel both excruciatingly long and panic-inducingly short – and then three weeks off. Normally I’d take four, but I’m saving one week for a bit later to finally take a trip to the UK that I originally planned for the summer of 2020. So far everything looks good and I’ve made all the essential reservations, but they’re all refundable just in case. Fingers crossed I won’t be needing those refunds…

That’s a wrap, folks

A paper I wrote with Alan Smeaton, titled “Privacy-aware sharing and collaborative analysis of personal wellness data: Process model, domain ontology, software system and user trial”, is now published in PLOS ONE. In all likelihood, this will be the last scientific publication to come out of the results of my MSCA fellowship in Dublin, so I’m going to take the risk of sounding overly dramatic and say it kind of feels like the end of an era. It took a while to get the thing published, but with all the more reason it feels good to be finally able to put a bow on that project and move on to other things.

So what’s next? More papers, of course – always more papers. As a matter of fact, the same week that I got the notification of acceptance for the PLOS ONE paper, I also got one for my submission to Ethicomp 2022. As seems to be the procedure in many ethics conferences, the paper was accepted based on an extended abstract and the full paper won’t be peer-reviewed, so as a research merit, this isn’t exactly in the same league as a refereed journal paper. However, since the conference is in Finland, I figured that the expenditure would be justifiable and decided to take this opportunity to pitch an idea I’d been toying with in my head for some time.

To be quite honest, this was probably the only way I was ever going to write a paper on that idea, since what I have right now is just that: an idea, not the outcome of a serious research effort but simply something I thought might spark an interesting discussion. Since I only needed to write an extended abstract for review purposes, I could propose the idea without a big initial investment of time and effort, so it wouldn’t have been a huge loss if the reviewers had rejected it as altogether too silly, which I was half expecting to happen. However, the reviewers turned out to agree that the idea would be worth discussing, so Turku, here I come again! That’s the beauty of philosophy conferences in my experience – they’re genuinely a forum for discussion, and I’ve never felt excluded despite being more of a computer scientist/engineer myself, which I presume has a lot to do with the fact that philosophers love to get fresh perspectives on things.

The idea itself is basically an out-of-the-box take on the notion of moral patiency of AI systems, and I will talk about it in more detail in another post, probably after the conference. Meanwhile, a follow-up to our Tethics 2021 paper on teaching AI ethics is at the planning stage, and I have the idea for yet another AI ethics paper brewing in my head. Since I returned to Finland and especially since I started working on the AI ethics course, I’ve been trying to raise my profile in this area, and I have to say I’m fairly pleased at how this is turning out. Recently I had a preliminary discussion with my supervisor about applying for a Title of Docent with AI and data ethics as my field of specialisation, although I haven’t actually started preparing my application yet.

The AI ethics course is now past the halfway point in terms of lecturing, and my own lectures are all done. I started this year’s course with my head full of new ideas from the university pedagogy course I recently completed, and some of them I’ve been able to put to good use, while others have not been so successful. I’ve been trying to encourage the students to participate more during lectures instead of just passively listening, and low-threshold activities such as quick polls seem to work pretty well, but my grand idea of devoting an entire teaching session to a formal debate met with a disappointing response. I don’t very much like the idea of forcing the students to do things they’re not motivated to do or don’t feel comfortable with, but I also don’t have a magic trick for enticing the students out of their comfort zone, so I’m not sure what to do here. I suppose I could settle for the small victories I did manage to win, but I still think that the students would really benefit from an exercise where they have to interact with one another and possibly adopt a position they don’t agree with. Oh well, I have another year now to come up with new ideas for them to shoot down.

Meanwhile, in the choir things are getting fairly intense, with three rehearsal weekends over the past four weeks, two for the whole choir and one for just the tenor section – although to be quite honest, during the latter we sang a grand total of one of the songs included in the set of the spring concert. We also have performances coming up on May Day and in the university’s Doctoral Conferment Ceremonies on the 28th of May, so there’s a lot of material to go through over the next month and a half. Immediately after the March reheasal weekend I tested positive in a COVID home test, so the dreaded bug finally caught up with me, something I’d been expecting for a while actually. It was a mild case, but still unpleasant enough that I wouldn’t fancy finding out what sort of experience it would be without the vaccine.

While on the subject of music, I can’t resist mentioning that I signed up to sing in the chorus in a production of The Magic Flute in January-February next year! That’s a first for me – I’ve been in the audience for plenty of operas, but never on the stage. I’m slightly dreading the amount of time and effort this will require, but in the end I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. There is still the caveat that if there are more people eager to sing than there are open positions, we may have to audition, but an oversupply of tenors is not a problem that frequently occurs in the choral world. The rehearsal period won’t start until much later in the year, but I’m already a little bit excited at the prospect!

Слава Україні

…yeah. So. This post is going to be rather different from what I usually write about. I certainly didn’t expect when I started the blog that I’d end up covering stuff like this one day, but the plight of Ukraine is making it hard to concentrate on other things, so I may as well try and channel that anxiety into something productive.

I won’t pretend to be even remotely qualified to make sense of all the information going around about how the Russian invasion is progressing, so what I can say with reasonable confidence basically amounts to “things are bad, but not as bad as they could be”. Among the more qualified, there seems to be a consensus that whatever the attackers have gained so far, it’s not as much as they expected and has cost them more than they expected. I can’t say I’m terribly optimistic about the eventual outcome of the war – Russia has plenty more resources to throw at Ukraine I’m sure – but it is heartening to see the Ukrainians fight back with such grim determination and the rest of Europe rally to the cause with such enthusiasm. Big protests everywhere, even in Russia where participating in one is a good way to land in jail.

There were two pro-Ukraine demonstrations here in Oulu during the past weekend, a smaller one with a few dozen participants on Saturday and a bigger one with several hundred on Sunday. I attended both, although I left the Saturday one pretty soon after arriving because I wasn’t really dressed for it and started to freeze my toes off. Even without the physical discomfort, the pleas of the local Ukrainian community weren’t easy to listen to as the speakers struggled to make words come out instead of sobs. As I walked away, I was very much aware of how privileged I was to be able to go to a cosy pub to get my feet warm and enjoy a pint without being in constant fear of news that a family member or friend has been killed.

It’s not just protests either, but imposing huge economic sanctions on the aggressors and supplying the defenders with weapons and intel. It’s frankly amazing how easy it ultimately was to get the entire European Union behind the package; even if you don’t factor in Russian efforts to sow discord among the member states, normally you’d expect it to take ages to get everyone to agree on something of this magnitude, but somehow we went from “endless internal bickering” to “united against a common enemy” in a matter of days. Even Switzerland has broken with its tradition of neutrality, and my own country decided yesterday to go against an established policy of not exporting weapons to conflict zones. Call me naïve, but I doubt this is something the Kremlin was counting on to happen when the invasion was launched.

To continue my layman speculation, while I fear that Ukraine may eventually be forced to capitulate, I’m not so sure that this will be more than a Pyrrhic victory for Putin. If the objectives of the “special military operation” are taken, what does that achieve in the long run? Is this supposed to persuade Ukraine to return to the fold of Mother Russia like a prodigal son, as the propaganda suggests? Good luck trying, with a crippled economy, to control a nation of 40+ million people who 1) are evidently full of fighting spirit, and 2) hate your guts for what you’ve done to them.

The list of responses to the invasion goes on and on; one of the more creative ones I’ve heard of is dog walkers in Helsinki picking up their pets’ waste and chucking it onto the grounds of the Russian embassy. Boycotts and condemnations have been announced in various fields of business, sports, culture… Academia, too: I’m pleased to report that my university has joined all other Finnish universities in supporting Ukraine and condemning Russia’s actions. The open letter signed by thousands of Russian scientists and science journalists opposed to the invasion is also very welcome, but even so, I don’t see how I could, under the circumstances, have any involvement in a scientific conference taking place in Russia or Belarus, for example.

Meanwhile, I do need to do also the part of my job that involves talking about things I actually know about. The second ever implementation of the AI ethics course is about to start in two weeks, and although planning it is not such a huge effort now compared to last year when we were creating everything from scratch, there’s still a fair bit of work to do. The university pedagogy course I’ve been taking has given me a few new ideas to try – I hope I can get them to work the way I’m envisioning. We’ve again managed to recruit a great line-up of visiting experts, too, so on the whole I have a pretty good feeling about this.

The choir has been operating more or less normally since the beginning of February, although last week we had to change some plans, once again because of COVID. A small group of singers, myself included, even got to do a gig at a private function, which was extremely refreshing. All of the big concerts we had planned for the spring term have been postponed, but instead we’re now rehearsing songs for a concert in May, the overarching theme of which happens to be death. When the choirmaster first told us about this idea, I found it quite amusing because of a rather dark inside joke running among some past and present colleagues of mine; it seems less funny now, but I really love the music, and hopefully by the date of the concert it won’t be quite so topical anymore.