The world is a stage

Another November, another Tethics! This year, the conference was hosted by the University of Vaasa and co-chaired by Ville Vakkuri, who has appeared several times on my AI ethics course as a guest lecturer. As usual, there were a bunch of other familiar faces as well, so in terms of social interaction, the conference was a nice mix of catching up with old acquaintances and getting to know new ones. Vaasa itself was a new acquaintance for me and quite a lovely one at that, insofar as any Finnish city in November can be described as “lovely”. On and near the university campus there were some cool old red-brick industrial buildings, reminiscent of the Finlayson Area in Tampere.

The conference program had a couple of new elements this year. On the first morning, there was a workshop with three papers that the participants were invited to help improve, but I decided to skip it, because I had my own talk in the first regular session that afternoon and wanted to do some rehearsing. The other new thing was a poster session, which followed immediately after I’d given my presentation, and I ended up chatting for a good while with a doctoral candidate from the University of Turku who’s researching the ethics of autonomous weapons, a topic I’ve had some involvement with since my talk in the Seminar on the Art of Cyber Warfare a year ago.

I also touched upon the subject in my own paper, which had the somewhat provocative title “Death by AI: A Survey of the Literature and Known Incidents”. I’ll write about it in more detail once it’s been officially published – which may well be next year, the CEUR-WS process tends to take its time apparently – but in a nutshell, I searched for academic literature associating AI with death, did the same for fatal AI incidents recorded in public databases, analysed the search results to see what sort of themes emerge from them and put the analyses next to each other to see if there are any interesting observations to be made. Not the most rigorous piece of research out there, but it seemed to engage the audience, and it certainly gave me a lot of ideas for future work.

My session was preceded by a keynote speech by Rachael Garrett, which I have to admit went a bit over my head at times, but I did find her experiments with dancers improvising with robots rather cool. The last session of the day had two papers about AI in education, so that of course was right up my alley. On the second day there was some more interesting AI stuff, a particular highlight being a paper on the perpetuation of gender stereotypes by AI image generators; as a bonus, I got to witness the first-ever use (in my career at least, if not the entire history of academia) of the phrase “slay queen” to comment on a conference presentation. In the afternoon there was a town hall meeting, where it was decided that the next Tethics will be organised by LUT University in Lahti (yay!), and then it was time for Kai Kimppa to conclude the programme with his keynote on the past, present and future of IT ethics research in Finland. Kai’s speech made for a very enjoyable end to the conference, and not just because I got name-checked as one of the “new generation” of Finnish IT ethicists!

The week before the conference I got some exciting news: my docentship application received the rector’s seal of approval, so as of the first of December I’m officially a docent of AI ethics and data ethics in the Faculty or Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Oulu. Feels pretty good! This came just in time for me to put the title in my CV for the winter call of the Research Council of Finland, which closed on the 12th. For a variety of reasons, I didn’t have a whole lot of time and energy to spend on my proposal, so I ended up submitting essentially the same one as last year, with some minor revisions to the research plan and a slightly fuller CV. I suppose I can view this as an experiment of sorts – will be interesting to see how the evaluator statements compare to the ones I received this year.

At work, things are now starting to calm down a bit towards the end-of-year holidays, but meanwhile, in the world of performing arts it’s getting busy. Last week we had the first proper rehearsals for the Ovllá opera: not just the chorus but director, soloists, conductor, rehearsal pianist, the works. This week there have been no rehearsals, but next week we’re bringing A Christmas Carol back to the stage, and the week after that the opera rehearsals will resume. I also recently got the notification that I’ve been selected into the choir for Beyond the Sky, so I’m three for three for the big 2026 productions I auditioned for back in May.

Working on the opera is an interesting experience, different from The Magic Flute in a couple of major respects. A rather obvious one is that instead of staging one of the most popular operas ever for the nth time, we are now creating something totally new, to be presented to the world for the very first time right here in Oulu. It’s an exciting thought, but at the same time, I’m very much aware that it’s hardly a safe bet. Will it bring in the crowds, not just the hardcore opera lovers? Not that I’ll have to answer to anyone if it doesn’t, but I do feel like I have my own tiny share of artistic ownership of the production and naturally I’m hoping that it will be a success.

The other big difference is in the level of cultural sensitivity constantly present at the rehearsals. The score brings together two very different musical traditions, and the libretto deals with some rather delicate themes; The Magic Flute has its own issues, sure, but at its heart it’s just a silly fairytale set in a fantasy world. With Ovllá, distancing ourselves from the story and dialogue is not an option, and it’s been clear from the get-go that the portrayal of the Sámi people and Sámi culture must be accurate and respectful. To that end, almost everyone in the design team is Sámi, as are the soloists playing Sámi characters.

That said, the rehearsals have been great fun as well as educational. I was already loving the music, and now that we’re starting to get an idea of what the opera is going to look like on stage, I’m getting properly stoked about it. I know already that there will be days when I’ll come home from work and dearly wish I could spend the evening on the couch instead of going to the theatre, but all things considered, a job in academia where the hours are very flexible is probably one of the easier ones to combine with a hobby like this. Besides, performing to an audience and working in a multicultural environment are surely skills that transfer both ways. Highly recommended!

Teachers still matter, right?

Starting with music news this time, because the new choir term is really off to a flying start: we’ve had seven performances already, with another one coming up tomorrow. A particularly memorable occasion was the grand opening of Nokia’s new “Home of Radio” campus in Oulu, where we had the honour of both opening and concluding the proceedings as well as providing music for the ribbon-cutting ceremony with Christopher Tin’s beautiful and appropriately jubilant Sogno di Volare from the video game Civilization VI. Various luminaries were in attendance, including the President of the Republic of Finland himself, Alexander Stubb.

It’s also been confirmed now that I will be appearing in the chorus of Ovllá, the new opera composed by Cecilia Damström for Oulu’s year as a European Capital of Culture. One of the performance languages is Northern Sámi, which I have next to no familiarity with despite it being one of Finland’s national languages, but I’ll take it as a challenge and an opportunity to learn. Another challenge is the sheer amount of work I’ve committed myself to: from late November to late April I’m going to have one of the busiest six-month periods of my life, as rehearsals for the opera will run in parallel with rehearsals and performances of A Christmas Carol, and around the time of the last opera performances, rehearsals for MASS will begin. How much Cassiopeia stuff I’ll be able to fit in among all this remains to be seen, but the usual Christmas concerts at least should be perfectly doable.

On the academic front, I spent the first few work weeks after my summer vacation mostly preparing materials for a training module that I’m developing for a new thing the university’s graduate school is launching this year called the PhD Supervisors’ Academy. Among the things offered by the Academy is a set of short online courses on a range of topics that a PhD supervisor should know about, and I was invited to create one on AI. This being me, there will be a notable emphasis on critical thinking and responsible use, but I’m doing my best to avoid coming across as overly negative and highlight the opportunities as well.

At the end of August I had to take some time to work on a conference manuscript that got conditionally accepted for publication, so I had to submit a major revision of it before the final decision. The paper definitely isn’t my best work and I felt there was a genuine possibility it might still be rejected after the revision, but thankfully it wasn’t. The conference in question is Tethics 2025, so my streak of having a paper there continues and I’ll get to do my usual trip to go see some old familiar faces. Should be a more relaxed trip than last year, too, since this time the conference doesn’t clash with any of my artistic engagements, and as a bonus I’ll get to visit a new city.

My Title of Docent application is moving forward as well, with one (positive) reviewer statement in and another one hopefully coming soon. After that, I’ll need to arrange a date for my demonstration lecture, which does frankly feel a little bit pointless – I’m not all that convinced that one twenty-minute lecture can say anything decisive about me as an educator that my CV and teaching portfolio don’t – but then, it’s not like I’m suffering from any dearth of material from which to put together such a lecture. Besides, I’m due to give a guest presentation on the intersection of AI and ethics next week at Oulun Suomalainen Klubi and my plan is to make the demonstration lecture a compressed version of the presentation with some pedagogical interactions thrown in at strategic points, so I’m kind of killing two birds with one stone here.

Before my vacation, I was interviewed by a journalist working on an article on the use of AI for content moderation on online platforms, more specifically for the detection of hate speech. He contacted me at the suggestion of a colleague of mine and we had a Zoom meeting where I gave him my views on the subject as an AI ethicist. This was my first time appearing as an expert in the media, so quite an exciting experience for me, and I think I managed not to make a complete fool of myself in the process. The article was published in August and is available online, though only in Finnish.

Another (sort of) new thing in my professional life this academic year is that I’m serving as a teacher tutor for the new batch of students who’ve now begun their studies in the master’s programme in computer science and engineering. It’s only sort of new in the sense that I’ve already been tutoring some students since the beginning of the calendar year, but the new students are the first ones I’m shepherding right from day one. Technically, the most important part of the job is guiding the students in making their personal study plans, but if my experiences from the spring term are any indication, simply listening to the students’ worries and offering encouragement is also a big part of it.

This got me thinking about how the need for formal tertiary education in subjects such as computing is sometimes questioned on the grounds that there are loads of online resources available that you can use to learn just about any technical skill on your own. It’s even been suggested that AI tutors will make human teachers obsolete by being available 24/7 and adapting perfectly to the student’s learning style and goals. I can’t dismiss such arguments entirely, but I think they’re assuming some kind of “ideal” student who’s crystal clear on what they need to learn and perfectly self-directed in finding and using the required resources. For all those “non-ideal” students, a university provides a structure for your studies and a social environment designed to carry you through them and beyond.

As it happens, both these aspects – providing structure and presenting a human face – are part of the role of the teacher tutor, and before you ask: yes, I’m fully aware of how convenient this conclusion is for me personally. I don’t suppose anyone likes to think of themselves as easily replaceable, so maybe I’m just trying to rationalise the belief that the university and I matter and will continue to matter even as technology marches on. Or maybe I do have a genuine point here that isn’t just about me refusing to go gently into the good night of AI-induced obsolescence. Take your pick!

Bah, humbug!

November is done, and with that, the last of my speaking engagements for this year. The Tethics conference was once again highly enjoyable, although I have to say I would have preferred not to take the night train to get there; even the absolute best-case scenario was getting six hours of sleep that night, and the reality was probably closer to half of that amount. I could have taken a morning train instead and skipped the beginning of the conference, but there were several AI-related papers scheduled to be presented in the morning sessions and I didn’t want to miss those, so I decided to just bite the bullet and suffer a night of inadequate sleep to catch them.

As it turned out, one of those morning presentations got cancelled, and in its place, the organisers had decided to have an impromptu roundtable on the immediate and not-so-immediate future of the conference. Regarding the former, it was decided that next year’s conference will be hosted by the University of Vaasa – a city I’ve never visited as far as I can recall, so it should be a nice change of scenery. The more general conclusions were largely the same as those of a similar discussion last year: the conference growing bigger and more international is a good thing, as long as it remains true to its original ideals. There was also a consensus that different universities taking turns organising the conference is a good idea, and that a steering committee of Tethics veterans should be formed to provide guidance and support.

After the lunch break it was time for John Danaher’s keynote titled “Do technologies disrupt moral paradigms?”, in which he looked at societal transformations induced / catalysed by technological breakthroughs such as the invention of the cannon. I found the talk highly enjoyable, although the effects of sleep deprivation were starting to get to me, so I wasn’t able to concentrate as fully as I would have liked. My own talk was in the session immediately after the keynote and went smoothly, with the lively follow-up discussion that I’ve come to expect from ethics conferences. I’ll post a summary of the paper later, once the proceedings have been published, but in a nutshell, it looks at how the concept of security is viewed by the AI ethics community (as opposed to the traditional cybersecurity community) and carries out a survey of AI incidents to get an idea of the real-world impact of security vulnerabilities in AI systems.

On the second day of the conference, I decided to sleep in and skip the first session; one badly slept night I can take, but not two in a row if I can help it, and after the conference dinner followed by drinks in a pub the night was pretty much ruined to begin with, even though I didn’t stay out very late and kept my alcohol consumption very moderate. Therefore I took my time to get up and have breakfast at the hotel before hauling myself to the conference in time for Anna Metsäranta’s keynote on “Sustainable AI – from principles to practice”. It was good to have someone from industry to shed light on how things are being done out there in the real world, so this was another highlight for me.

In the last session before the closing of the conference, I participated in the running of a workshop with the lofty title “The current state and future of technology ethics education in Finland”. To be quite honest, most of the work was done by Ville Vakkuri and Kai-Kristian Kemell and my own contribution was rather modest, but nevertheless, it was interesting to have this opportunity to share thoughts on this topic and to get ideas for enhancing the computer science and engineering curriculum in Oulu from the perspective of ethics. The question of timing is a particularly interesting one: when should ethics education be offered? At the very beginning of their studies, the students are perhaps not yet ready to absorb that kind of knowledge, but if we wait until after they’ve finished their bachelor’s studies, it may be too late already. Not everyone needs to be an ethics expert, of course, but I do believe that everyone should be exposed to enough ethics content during their studies to normalise the idea that awareness of ethics is part of what makes a good engineer.

Fast-forward about three weeks and I’m in Helsinki, on the island of Santahamina, in the auditorium building of the Finnish National Defence University for the annual seminar on the art of cyber warfare. Instead of an auditorium, the seminar took place inside a small studio set up with a green screen and a webcasting rig; initially, it felt somewhat silly to have travelled all the way there just to stream my presentation, but in the interest of making sure everything runs smoothly, it made perfect sense. Besides, it made the whole thing look a great deal more professional than having each speaker join from their home / office / wherever. My colleague Kimmo Halunen served as moderator, introducing the speakers and relaying audience questions submitted via chat.

The theme of this year’s seminar was AI on the battlefield, and I had been invited to speak on this theme with my AI ethicist hat on. Since I spend a fair amount of time discussing the ethics of autonomous weapons in one of the lectures of my AI ethics course, I decided to build on that and it worked out quite nicely. Somebody told me that there were close to 500 people online for the stream during my talk, and the feedback I’ve heard seems to indicate that it was well received. I’ve already been invited to contribute in some capacity to a couple of dissertations on autonomous weapons, which I’m taking as a sign that I made a positive impression and managed to get some actual successful networking done. The entire seminar (in Finnish) is available to view on YouTube, with my talk starting about 44 minutes in.

Now that I’m apparently finished with the speaking circuit for 2024, it’s a good time to reflect a bit. Based on my experience, I would say that I’m actually quite adaptable and versatile, capable of dealing effectively with a variety of audiences, but where I’m at my best – and what I also enjoy the most – is academic seminars. It’s like taking the best of both worlds from lectures and conference presentations: instead of being limited to the scope of a single paper, I get to draw broadly on my expertise and interests to prepare my talk, but I still get to speak primarily as a researcher rather than a teacher, so I can be more relaxed when it comes to the pedagogical aspect. I feel like I can really express myself within those parameters, and it’s always a delight to discover new avenues for that.

Speaking of self-expression, A Christmas Carol has been running for about a month now and is off to a very strong start: the reviews I’ve seen have been highly positive, and all 2024 performances have been sold out for a good while now. 2025 is very much a different matter, and I suppose it’s not surprising that people are much keener to see the play before Christmas than after, but hopefully they won’t lose interest altogether if they didn’t manage to get tickets for before. It’s been great so far, but I suspect that we’re all going to be sick of carols by February, and it certainly won’t help if we’re singing them to an empty house. The demands of the play have been such that I’ve had to prioritise theatre over choir rather heavily, but I’ve managed to squeeze in just enough rehearsal time with Cassiopeia to sing in our Christmas concerts without embarrassing myself, so art-wise, it’s been quite a productive end of the year!

Christmas itself is just a couple of weeks away, so this is in all likelihood my last post of the year. As I’m writing this, I don’t yet have an employment contract for the coming year, but that’s hardly anything out of the ordinary and I expect it will be sorted out soon. If it’s not – well then, get in touch if you need someone to play some music or to give a talk on AI and I’ll get back to you with a quote, I guess?

Deck the halls

It’s been a weird couple of months since I came back from my summer vacation. I haven’t kept track of how my working time has been split among the tools I’ve used, but if I had, I’m pretty sure that number one on the list would be PowerPoint. So many lectures and presentations! I guess it’s good that I get to work on my communication skills, and I do even quite enjoy it when I get to give a well-prepared presentation on a topic I’m genuinely interested in and have something original to say about, but still, enough is enough. I’m hoping this is just a temporary state of affairs, but if not, I may need to work on my saying no to speaker invitations skills.

Indeed, 2024 is already a record year for me in terms of the number of various speaking engagements I’ve had. There are two major reasons for this, the first one being the Reboot Skills project, in which I designed and implemented a course titled Data Governance and Privacy. In addition to the course sessions – three main ones in Finnish, plus an additional one in English in collaboration with the University of Limerick – I’ve attended at least three industry events where I spoke on the subject and pitched the course before it began. Despite these efforts, the course attracted a disappointingly small number of participants, but even so, I’m quite happy to lay it to rest for now and focus on other things.

The other reason is my work on AI ethics, which has gotten me invited to a bunch of seminars recently. This semester I’ve already participated in two: in August, there was a university pedagogy seminar where I presented again the results of my pilot study on integrating AI tools into AI ethics teaching, and a week ago I spoke on responsible AI in research in a seminar organised by the university’s Ethics Working Group. Coming up next is the Tethics conference, where I will both present a paper and co-host a workshop on technology ethics education, and at the end of November comes a seminar at the Finnish National Defence University in Helsinki, where I’m slated to give my perspective as an AI ethicist on the topic of AI in the battlefield. Nothing yet scheduled for December, but there’s still time…

Tethics, for me, is going to be a somewhat more hurried affair this year. I will be there for the whole duration of the conference, but instead of traveling the day before as I normally would, I’m going to take a night train that arrives in Tampere in the morning of the first day. The reason for this is that I have commitments in Oulu that prevent me from leaving much earlier than midnight on the night between the 5th and 6th of November. More specifically, on the evening of the 5th is the first of three dress rehearsals for a stage adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol at Oulu City Theatre, and I won’t be in town for the other two so I can’t afford to skip it.

That’s right, I’m going to be back on stage, less than a year after the end of The Magic Flute! The director is the same, and when I heard she was looking for singers for this production, it didn’t take me too long to decide that I want in. The only reason why I needed any time at all to think about it was that the rehearsals clash with those of Cassiopeia, so I’ve been mostly absent from the choir since the beginning of September. However, it’s not that often that an opportunity like this turns up, and the only big choir thing remaining this year is the traditional Christmas concert, so I figured now’s not the worst time to take a little break.

Compared to the opera, working on the play is notably different in a few respects. For one thing, instead of a whole chorus of forty singers there’s only a quartet, and we also have significantly more time on stage, so I have a bigger role now, even though I’m not playing an actual named character. I even have a couple of spoken lines! I’m also officially employed by the theatre this time – the pay is hardly worth mentioning, but just the fact that I’m getting money for something I’m basically doing as a hobby is pretty cool.

Artistically speaking, the biggest difference is that we’re not on stage as singers, but rather as actors playing singers. This may seem like semantic quibbling but is actually a significant distinction, as everything we do on stage must be in service of the story. To some extent this was the case also with The Magic Flute, but surely it would have been too sacrilegious to touch Mozart’s music, no matter what the director’s vision is calling for. Here, on the other hand, it’s often the case that we don’t get to sing a song all the way through because the rhythm of the scene doesn’t allow it, and on a couple of occasions we get interrupted mid-verse by stage events. Apart from that, everything feels quite natural and I’m really happy and excited to be doing theatre again.

Another thing I’m very happy about is that with the Data Governance and Privacy course finished, I have some time to work on things that aren’t my next PowerPoint slideshow for a change. Like writing papers! There’s one I’ve been itching to get started on for a good while now, and it looks like now is finally the time. I’m also supposed to be working in a couple of projects besides Reboot Skills, and “no updates from me” is a phrase I’ve had to use a bit too frequently in meetings of late. Who knows – maybe there’ll be more papers to write once I’ve reminded myself what it is that I’m meant to be doing in those projects…

Mission accomplished

The mission being my university pedagogy studies. Yep, I’m now officially done – the final grade for the final part, the teaching practice, was awarded today. I know it’s just the basic studies, but it almost feels like I’ve completed a whole degree. In the concluding seminar four weeks ago, the first in-class assignment was to choose one from a set of cards with pictures of works of art on them and tell everyone else why that one; I went straight for The Garden of Death by Hugo Simberg because frankly, I was feeling pretty dead from basically being in high gear all spring, but there was also some more positive symbolism of planting and growth there. In any case, I’m not going to even consider the possibility of intermediate studies until I’ve taken a gap year.

The ethics course is more or less a wrap, although there are still a few students with some assignments missing. It’s another record year for the course, with 50 registrations and almost 30 completions, around ten more than last year. Partly because of the record numbers, I wasn’t able to keep to the formative assessment schedule I was aiming for, where each learning assignment would have been assessed before the next one is due. There were other issues with the assignments as well – the new format I tried this year was a step forward, but it’s clear that there’s still plenty of room for improvement in terms of reducing the potential gains from using generative AI as a substitute for thinking and learning.

Overall, however, I would say that the teaching practice was a success. The experiments I carried out produced useful data and experience on how to integrate AI tools in various ways into the teaching of AI ethics, and my debating chatbot experiment in particular yielded some very interesting research material. There’s a blog post coming out at some point where I discuss the teaching practice in more detail, and later hopefully also a peer-reviewed publication or two, once I’ve had the time to properly analyse the data and write up the results.

The spring in general has been a mixed bag, with some efforts successful, some not so much. I applied for two big things – a university lecturer position and a Research Council of Finland grant – neither of which I got. On the other hand, I’ve had a series of speaking engagements at various events that all went perfectly well as far as I can tell. I particularly enjoyed the most recent one, an online seminar titled Ethics of AI Hype, where I did my best to put the current generative AI boom into perspective. Truth be told, I’ll jump at any chance to talk gratuitously about the history of computing, but I do also believe that it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of the decades of AI research that took place before anyone had ever heard of such a thing as a large language model.

One event that I can describe with total confidence as a resounding success was the 45th anniversary concert of Cassiopeia. What a privilege it is to be in a choir that’s so skilled and versatile, and such a wonderful community to boot! In a single concert you may hear anything from pop hits to a Cree musical prayer to Mother Earth and from video game themes to a ten-minute-long modern composition commemorating the victims of the MS Estonia disaster. The cherry on top was that the anniversary celebrations coincided almost to the day with my own 45th birthday, so alongside the choir’s milestone, I got to celebrate a personal one in style.

The latest bit of good news (apart from the official conclusion of the pedagogy studies) came just a few days ago: a paper I submitted to this year’s Tethics conference got accepted! Should be a great experience once again; although the location has changed from Turku to Tampere, many of the same people are still involved in one way or another, so I’m looking forward to seeing plenty of familiar faces and catching up with their owners. Also accepted was a proposal for a workshop on tech ethics education, with Ville Vakkuri, Kai-Kristian Kemell, Tero Vartiainen and myself running the show, so I’ll be doing double duty this year, which I don’t mind at all. The reviewers’ suggestions for improving the paper were nothing major and the original camera-ready deadline of June 30 has been pushed back to August 11, so I think I’ll just let it be until after my vacation. The beginning of which, by the way, is barely more than a week away now!

All of the music, all of the magic

The conference proceedings of Tethics 2023 is out now, including the paper I co-authored – always a pleasant feeling to see your work in its final published form. Interestingly, this year the number of papers submitted for review was given in the preface, which I believe hadn’t been the case previously. Turns out the number was 26, so with 13 papers accepted for publication, the acceptance rate was exactly 50%. Nice to know that despite the small scale of the conference, getting accepted wasn’t a foregone conclusion!

The other papers I’ve had in the works recently have not, alas, been so well received. A journal manuscript to which I made a small contribution came back with a “major revision” verdict – with one of the reviewers being, frankly, rather vague and unhelpful – and another in which I’m the sole author got flat out rejected based on input from just one reviewer, which I wasn’t aware could even happen. Granted, the journal I submitted to is outside my usual field, so perhaps the culture is different there, but I would have thought that it would be standard practice in any field to get two reviews minimum. Maybe a second opinion wouldn’t have swayed the editor’s decision – the single reviewer’s criticisms were mostly fair, I suppose, although there were some misunderstandings – but at least I would have felt better about the process.

Oh well, no point in complaining, better divert that energy to figuring out what to do next with the manuscript. I’m leaning toward submitting it to another journal more or less as is, although maybe I’ll need to change the angle a bit, depending on the journal. I haven’t decided on a target yet or even made a shortlist of potential ones, but probably I’ll go with something closer to home this time. I suppose it’s always an issue when you do cross-disciplinary work that it may not be easy to find a publication channel where it fits in naturally.

Another question lacking a definitive answer is exactly when I’m going to be able to do whatever it is that I’ll end up doing with that manuscript. I’d love to have it revised and submitted before the holidays, but with the start of the Christmas break barely over a week away, I very much doubt the realism of that wish. In theory, it would be doable, given that the usual end-of-term flood of exam papers to be marked has dwindled to a trickle, but in practice, I’m too stressed about a couple of other things, namely my university pedagogy studies and my (so far notional) application to the Research Council of Finland.

That’s right, the Academy of Finland has made some changes recently: its official English name is now the Research Council of Finland, and the former September call for applications has been moved to January. Presumably the net impact of both of these on my life is approximately neutral, but I felt like I should mention them all the same. Anyway, I have my Academy Research Fellow application from last year that I should be able to repackage as an Academy Project application without revising the topic or approach in a fundamental way, so hopefully this round will be somewhat easier than some others I can think of.

Meanwhile, the choir had its traditional Christmas concert last Saturday – I got to sing my very first solo with Cassiopeia! – but that was by no means our final performance of the year. Tonight and tomorrow we are doing something rather special with Oulu Sinfonia: two screenings of Chris Columbus’s festive classic Home Alone with the musical score played live. There isn’t a whole lot of singing to do – all of it is in the second half of the film, and much of it is just for the sopranos and altos, who get to play the role of the children’s choir in the church scene – and initially I wasn’t terribly excited about the whole thing, but that changed on Tuesday when we had our first rehearsal with the conductor. Mr Gabriele turned out to be so full of enthusiasm and so good at working with singers that it was an absolute delight to rehearse with him and I’m now actually pretty hyped about the performances. Bring on the Wet Bandits!

I guess that wraps it up for the blog this year. Usually I have at least the days between Christmas and New Year as time off, but this year I’ll be back at “work” already on the 28th, when the process of getting ready for the new run of The Magic Flute kicks off for real. There are only seven rehearsals scheduled for the chorus before opening night, and that includes the dress rehearsal when we are already going to have an audience in the house, but after the two preliminary ones we had in November, I’m already quite confident. It’s frankly amazing how not just the music but also all the stage action had stuck with me through all the idle time since the last performance in February, but I guess that’s what repetition after repetition after repetition will eventually do to you. The one thing I’m not so sure about (for a number of reasons) is the opening scene choreography, but at least there’s something to keep me from getting cocky!

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…

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!

“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?

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!