This book explores some of the ethical, legal, and social implications of chatbots, or conversational artificial agents. It reviews the possibility of establishing meaningful social relationships with chatbots and investigates the consequences of those relationships for contemporary debates in the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence. The author introduces current technological challenges of AI and discusses how technological progress and social change influence our understanding of social relationships. He then argues that chatbots introduce epistemic uncertainty into human social discourse, but that this can be ameliorated by introducing a new ontological classification or 'status' for chatbots. This step forward would allow humans to reap the benefits of this technological development, without the attendant losses. Finally, the author considers the consequences of chatbots on human-human relationships, providing analysis on robot rights, human-centered design, and the social tension between robophobes and robophiles.

Autorentext

Hendrik Kempt, M.A. is Research Associate at the Institute for Applied Ethics at RWTH Aachen, Germany, and was previously a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California and Brown University, USA. He is author of Moral Progress and AI (in Yearbook of Practical Philosophy, 2019), and editor of RuPaul's Drag Race and Philosophy (2020).

Inhalt
Chapter 1: Introduction1.1.Smart Fridges and other Reifications1.2.What's to come?chapter 2: Methods 2.1.Concepts and Conceptual Analysis2.2.Description and Evaluation of Technologies2.3.Distinctions and Discovery in Philosophy of Technology2.4.Normative Philosophy of Technology2.5.Moral Philosophy, Morality, Ethics 2.6.AI Ethics2.7.ConclusionChapter 3: Social Relationships3.1.The Concept of the Social3.2.Towards a Digital Society 3.3.Assigning social descriptors3.4.From Social Descriptors to Social Relationships3.5.Agent-Network Theory, Attachment Theories3.6.Gender as Relational Descriptor3.7.Institutionalized Relationships and Relationships qua Humanity3.8.Domestication as a Social Technique 3.9.Against Relational Arbitrariness3.10. Lessons for Imminent Changes or: The Rise of Human-Machine Relationships Chapter 4: Conversational Artificial Agents4.1.Definitions4.2.A short history of Chatbots4.3.Is ML-AI the future of chatbots?4.4.AI General or narrow?4.5.The Economics of NLP 4.6.Turing Test and its human limits4.7.Conclusion: Why think about AI in the first place?Chapter 5: Chatbots as Social Agents5.1.Rethinking Social Descriptors 5.2.Philosophical Implications of (Non-)Anthropomorphism5.3.Patiency and Pragmacentrism5.4.Relating to the Artificial 5.5.A Second Domestication5.6.From Social Descriptors to Social Agents5.7.A Second Domestication Continued5.8.Conclusion6.Social Reverberations6.1.Robot Rights6.2.Human-centered design6.3.Including non-human agents in normative systems6.4.New Social Fault Lines6.5.ConclusionChapter 7: Conclusion7.1.Thinking Forward7.2.Acting Forward