„Already in the late 1980s, historians of the Soviet Union found Cold War analytical concepts of total control, repressive institutions, cynical indoctrination or mass mobilization more of a hindrance to their accounts of related socio-cultural phenomena.  The sudden collapse of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe 35 years ago brought their analytic questions about the framework introduced by Friedrich’s and Brzezinski’s work close to the core of the social sciences for the whole region’s recent past.  With massive amounts of archival materials open for interpretation, many historians of the former Soviet bloc have decried what they perceive as politically biased accounts of the region’s societies.  But what captivates historians such as Fulbrook, or Kocka (on the former GDR), Connelly (in comparative historiography of the Soviet bloc) or David-Fox (on the former Soviet Union) can be summarized as questions with a distinct philosophical ring, such as these:  Where lie the explanatory limits of totalitarianist analyses of people’s lives in the Soviet bloc?  Which social-theoretical frameworks offer more promising starting points, and for what kind of empirical findings?  I appeal to a more abstract description, in social ontology, of norms for collective action and/or institutions in order to defend the standpoints of their preferred accounts and preserve some of the earlier insights of the totalitarianism paradigm.„

Următoarea prezentare din cadrul seriei de seminare de cercetare ale Departamentului de Filosofie Teoretică în parteneriat cu CELFIS aparține conf. Carlo Martini. Titlul prezentării sale online este „Fake news and post-truth revisited„.

Vorbitorul (https://philpeople.org/profiles/carlo-martini) este Associate Professor la Vita-Salute San Raffaele din Milano și fellow al TINT – Centre for Philosophy of Social Science – Universitatea din Helsinki. De asemenea, este Associate Editor la European Journal for Philosophy of Science. Două articole recente ale sale sunt „How different incentives reduce scientific misinformation online” (Harvard Misinformation Review) și „Lateral reading and monetary incentives to spot disinformation about science” (Nature Scientific Reports).

Comunicarea acestuia este parte dintr-un ciclu de conferințe asociat programului masteral „Filosofie și gândire critică„. Aceste evenimente sunt deschise studenților în filosofie, psihologie, antropologie, științe politice, jurnalism, sociologie, lingvistică, digital humanities, științele comunicării, și multe altele – oriunde gândirea critică ne permite o apreciere reflexivă, atentă la temeiuri pro și contra, a temelor dezbătute public. Detaliile programului sunt disponibile aici: https://filosofie.unibuc.ro/masterat-in-filosofie-si-gandire-critica/

Prezentarea se va desfășura hibrid vineri, 6 decembrie 2024, orele 17.00-18.00, în sala „Constantin Noica” de la etajul 1 al Facultății de Filosofie din Splaiul Independenței nr. 204, București 060024. Detalii Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83668152750?pwd=H8WdLvhwU6RiqNukxgC8PaYbR5oBKG.1
Meeting ID: 836 6815 2750  Passcode: ZjC92L    

Pentru mai multe detalii, vă rugăm urmăriți pagină Facebook „Seminarul Departamentului de Filosofie Teoretică UniBuc” și https://philevents.org/event/show/127766  

„The recent development in technology, as well as the wide spread of AI tools (chatbots, large language models and tools such as ChatGPT or Midjourney) have raised several concerns with regards to the future of (especially creative) work, education (use of AI tools and plagiarism detection, use of robots in classrooms), healthcare (therapy chatbots), as well as childcare and eldercare (social robots).

Creativity applies to different fields, such as art, science, sports, engineering, and research. It is also commonly found in daily activities such as cooking, joking, and cleaning. Most activities can be done in a creative way. So far, it has been traditionally assumed that art can only be created by human agents, which is why, perhaps as a design challenge, new AI tools such as Midjourney, DALL–E, CANs (Creative Adversarial Networks) and GANs (Generated Adversarial Networks) have been used to produce content such as photos, music, poetry, texts used in advertising, journalism, science and even in research projects or art projects. Recently, the fear that AI might replace artists, translators and even researchers, has become a pressing issue.

I argue that no putative criteria or any single putative criterion distinguishes AI from human creativity in a justified way. In this article I survey the most popular ones and find them controversial, lacking or both. In light of this, I believe that the impact of AI creativity on our lives and the policies suited for them ought to be reassessed open-mindedly.”

„This paper promotes an interpretation of AI systems (Deep Neural Networks, DNN, and some Machine Learning Algorithms, MLA) as models and extends results about scientific and formal models (mainly mathematical models) from the philosophy of science to AI algorithms. It addresses two main questions about representation and explanation of this interpretation: (T) What is modeled or represented by the AI system (the target T of the AI model)? (E) Are AI systems explanatory? After surveying some answers to question T, the paper argues that the most realistic representation of AI systems is T as a “quasi-target” (T is not a real object but a counterfactual or hypothetical target). Furthermore, the paper argues that AI systems have explanatory power and surrogate reasoning from these models is possible in a limited number of cases. For this purpose, the AI systems are interpreted as ensembles of models, and explanations from AI models are exploratory and “how-possibly,” at best. The explananda of AI systems are not real targets but features of data or methods of collecting data.”