SES Lecture—Engineering Ethics

The Saskatoon Engineering Society (SES) has a mandate to advance the engineering profession and related societies by assisting in information exchange between Society members and the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan (APEGS) Council by acting as a local agent and focal point to promote matters pertaining to the education and awareness of the profession.

Saskatoon Engineering Society

Dr Buschert will provide an overview of engineering ethics.

Room 2C88 Engineering Building

AI, Ethics, and Intellectual Property Rights: A Guided Tour for EngineersAccording to legend, the term “artificial intelligence” (AI) was coined in 1956 at a U.S. DARPA-sponsored summer conference at Dartmouth College. But philosophers have been pondering ‘artificial thinking things’ for quite a long time – arguably going all the way back to Aristotle in the 5th century BCE. And, from the beginning, AI has been a useful source of examples for keeping philosophical theorizing honest. For instance, posing the question “Can machines think?”(as Alan Turing put it in 1950) requires us to get clear on exactly what we mean by “thinking.” If our model of “thinking” is “thinking the way human beings do it,” then we might simply assume that thinking necessarily requires elements that seem to characterize human thinking, such as representation (it needs to be ‘about’ something) or sentience (it involves felt experience or sensations). But then if an approach to AI such as machine learning or natural language processing suggests that thinking is possible without any obvious role for representation or sentience…well, philosophers have to go back to the drawing board and either defend or abandon their initial assumptions.In this talk I’ll be looking specifically the question of whether an AI can be the kind of thing that can be (or should be) the bearer of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), such as copyrights or patents. In particular, what does an entity have to have, what kind of thing does it have to be, in order for it to be the kind of entity that can claim IPRs? In the literature of philosophy and law, there are two main moral justifications offered for IPRs. The desert argument holds that IPRs are owed to individuals by virtue of some property or capacity that those individuals possess – for instance, their creativity or their capacity for expression. The utilitarian argument, by contrast, holds that IPRs are justified insofar as awarding IPRs creates overall beneficial outcomes that would not arise in the absence of IPRs. In particular, the utilitarian argument holds that IPRs create financial and reputational incentives that will lead more intellectual goods being created than we might otherwise have.For obvious reasons, our existing moral justifications (and, for that matter, our existing legal frameworks) for IPRs assume that the right-holder is natural (human) person – the kind of entity that is capable of exhibiting creativity or expression, and/or which is capable of responding to financial or reputational incentives. Possibly an AI may be capable of these things. Or perhaps not. But determining this requires us to get clear about what we mean by these things and perhaps, I argue, to re-evaluate how IPRs are justified in the first place.<ul><li>6﻿:30 PM—Networking with Tea &amp; Coffee</li><li>7﻿:00 PM—Lecture</li></ul>T﻿his lecture is designed to satisfy the Ethics Requirement in your APEGS Continual Professional Development for 2023. Upon request, a certificate will be provided.T﻿his lecture is designed to quality for one CPD Credit for Formal Activity.

Will Buschert did his graduate work in political philosophy and the philosophy of technology at the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto. He is the author of a number of articles in Research in Phenomenology, the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, the Canadian Journal of Political Science and other academic journals, and also serves on the editorial board of the Canadian Journal of Practical Philosophy. He has taught at the University of Saskatchewan since 2001 in the Department of Philosophy and occasionally also, since 2002, in the Department of Political Studies.

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SES Lecture—Engineering Ethics

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