Ethics, regulation and the new artificial intelligence, part II: autonomy and liability

This is the second article in a two-part series on the social, ethical and public policy implications of the new artificial intelligence (AI). The first article briefly presented a neo-Durkheimian understanding of the social fears projected onto AI, before arguing that the common and enduring myth of an AI takeover arising from the autonomous decision-making capability of AI systems, most recently resurrected by Professor Kevin Warwick, is misplaced. That article went on to argue that, nevertheless, some genuine and practical issues in the accountability of AI systems that must be addressed. This second article, drawing further on the neo-Durkheimian theory, sets out a more detailed understanding of what it is for a system to be autonomous enough in its decision making to blur the boundary between tool and agent. The importance of this is that this blurring of categories is often the basis, the first article argued, of social fears.     

Making Feminist Sense out of ‘Charlie Wilson's War’

Charlie Wilson's War (2007), Mike Nichols's film about the womanizing Congressman who engineered black funds for the CIA's proxy war in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, is historically misleading but highly instructive, because in packaging dominant American masculine identity and war politics as popular entertainment for post-9/11 audiences, it reveals the sexed and gendered ‘politics of the visual’ in global affairs. This intertextual study of ‘Charlie Wilson's war’ as movie, constructed history and legacy examines Wilson as a prime exhibit of a needy masculinity that, like the film's emasculated CIA, bulks itself up through surrogate military selves. It also analyses modes of the imaginary and specularity in brother-bonding with the mujahidin, tracks the proxy system's loops of masculine identity-and-war-making between Stateside and South Asia in the post-Vietnam 1980s and interrogates the dynamics of imperial ‘un-seeing’ in this campaign and its long aftermath. While US proxy wars proliferate worldwide, the lack of useable political memory about the ground truths of ‘Charlie's war’ continues to matter because America's second ‘good’ war in Afghanistan, bound to the first by gendered causal links, has re-empowered the forces that still menace women's rights and lives.     

Wedding the dragon: The powerful feminine as seen in Jewish women’s dreams

Abstract

This article addresses the theological and liturgical problem of incorporating mythic traditions of the divine feminine into contemporary practice, given the typically essentialist nature of these traditions. The article considers the dream practice of a Jewish women’s learning community, the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, and applies this practice to several “dragon dreams” in which dragons appear as powerful, erotic, sacred figures that “queer” the divine feminine by offering a norm-upending vision of what the feminine is and does. These dragon dreams provide a powerful alternative to traditional Jewish images of the female dragon in which the dragon represents the demonic feminine. I suggest that dreams can offer a “queering” of mythic images of the sacred feminine because they contain images that have mythic depth but also upend norms and expectations. The article then explores how these dragon images have made their way into the liturgy and theology of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute.     

Un atelier d’écriture internationale : l’OCDE au travail. Éléments de sociologie de la forme « rapport »

The writing of a “transversal” report on employment at the OECD is examined by focusing not on the finished product but, instead, on the drafting of the report. This approach allows for exploring the dynamics of power at work inside the OECD. It opens toward broader considerations about how this type of international organization produces knowledge in economics and weaves relations, throughout the long process of drafting the report, with those who requested it. This article analyzes how economic issues are assembled through a succession of intermediate studies and reshaped through an asymmetrical competition between services. By making visible the process of constructing the position of “institutional author”, this analysis repositions on new grounds the problem of “influence”, which usually arises in organizations of this sort.     

Politique et expertise scientifique. La régulation européenne des médicaments

A study of the EU system for regulating medicinal products is used to show the usefulness of distinguishing between policy-making and scientific expertise when analyzing political decision-making. This approach presupposes identifying the characteristics of scientific expertise. The experts responsible for assessing drugs have to combine knowledge and action. Questions are raised about how work is shared between decision-makers and experts. In the case of medicinal products, the work of experts has absorbed decision-making. Lest we waver between explanations in terms either of science or else of politics, it is necessary to substantively identify expertise’s political dimensions. Two conceptions — the “healthy man’s” and the “sick man’s” — of the purpose of assessing medicinal products stand out in debates; but political authorities pay no heed to them.     

La contingence et le travail de conception. Définir,organiser, délibérer

The activity of a design office consists in producing plans for things that do not yet exist. If, through poor management, the designers fail to anticipate accurately what the product will be, work will be inappropriately allocated and divided. Given the uncertain nature of the activity and the outcome, designers are simultaneously involved in the process of producing technical solutions, a process of organisation — through constant reallocation of tasks — and a political process of ironing out disagreements — through the exploration of multiple heterogeneous possibilities.     

The electronic face of government in the internet age: borrowing from Murray Edelman

The issue of legitimation by political elites has been a central concern of political scientists for many years. This article draws upon the work of Murray Edelman who was instrumental in analysing this relationship between rulers and ruled, the relatively powerful and relatively powerless, through an understanding of language, symbolism and the manipulation of information. It concludes with the contention that the Internet offers the prospect for governments to create new 'electronic faces', which act to support a symbolic architecture of power.     

The Formation of English Cyber- neologism

Based on the lexical word-building process, this paper firstly analyzes the characteristics of English cyber-neologism and then explores the formations of it in recent ten years, and finally discusses its influence on the formation of Chinese.     

Le SAT et l’accès aux études supérieures : le recrutement des élites américaines en question

James Conant developed the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in the 1930s in line with thought about the mobility of elites, a subject that many American as well as European intellectuals were discussing. This test, now used for the admission of high school graduates to universities, was to be a means for detecting talented youngsters and, in fine, producing a model of society. Nowadays, the SAT has a value as a means of effectively comparing students nationwide; but in practice, it serves to reproduce a certain social elite. Far from measuring pure intelligence disconnected from culture, it has turned into a commodity advantageous to certain social groups and ethnic communities.     

Destins professionnels des femmes ingénieures. Des retournements inattendus

In the late 1970s, a major change in techniques and a modification of the job structure opened the way for women to become engineers in the computer sciences. At the time, working conditions and policies for managing careers allowed them to benefit from ascending mobility, while still investing in family life. Given its strong growth, information technology soon became the main branch of the French economy with openings for women engineers. The downturn in employment during the 1990s and its management through “psychology-based” training arrangements restored the sexual division of labor, as women were forced out of “noble” positions in engineering and design or even out of the branch itself. These two recent trends — a feminization and then “defeminization” of reputedly “masculine” jobs — are analyzed.     

WHAT IS THE MULTITUDE?

Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman continue their conversation with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. (See ‘The Global Coliseum: On Empire’ in Cultural Studies, 16.2, (March 2002), p. 177–192). In this new interview they press the authors of Empire and Multitude on questions that have arisen both out of their own involvement with the theoretical issues generated by Empire and from new areas opened up by Multitude. Why is the multitude not a class? How can the unity of a political project be maintained in the multiplicity of the multitude? Is democracy still a project for the future? Can a political subject constitute itself outside the structure of sovereignty? In other words, what is the multitude?     

DEFINING MOMENTS: THE TENSION BETWEEN RICHNESS AND REACH

The defining moments of traditional spatially based higher education are made up of fixed and fluid experiences. These 'moments' are now creaking as funding per student falls and the romanticized ideal of an education detached from 'real' life falters under the weight of highly variable student experiences. Distance learning in all its guises has always been regarded as inferior by those embedded in the traditional system. However more and more students demand something different from costly campus-based education. It is time for a more open discussion about the tensions between richness and reach and the role that new facilities like the Internet could play in reaching more students without wallowing in the nostalgia that often accompanies such debates.     

On Subtitle Translation

Under the background of increasingly frequent international cultural exchanges, the film subtitle translation attracts more and more attention. It helps the film appreciation across different cultures and promotes the culture transmission. In the film subtitle translation practice, a lot of efforts have been made. The status quo of film subtitle translation is fairish on the whole. But there are still several major problems hindering the development of film subtitle translation. Thus there is still a lot to do to improve it.     

The causes of terrorism

Abstract

Terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 and after intensified concerns about a global Jihad and other forms of terrorism, and renewed calls to better understand its causes or roots. There have been divergent views on this question, and terrorism has been argued to be caused by increased poverty, rapid urbanization, declining traditional authority, globalization, and so forth. These differences, reflecting philosophical, religious, political and other differences, are not merely academic; they can affect our understanding of both the threat and of responses to terrorism. This article provides an analytic framework for understanding the limits to understanding the causes of terrorism, identifying what can be known about causation and assessing counterterrorism implications.     

A Stylistic Analysis of Hemingway’s A Clean,Well-Lighted Place

One important theme of Hemingway＇s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is the nothingness of life itself, At the beginning of this short story, Hemingway presents a setting--the cafe, which is familiar to us, and then moves our attention to focus on the characters within that setting, The story is told through the dialogues between the two waiters and is in third-person narration, In the following paragraphs we will focus on stylistic characteristics of this short story,     

INFORMATION-CENTRED DESIGN: A methodology for designing virtual meeting DESIGN environments

Development of single-user computer applications has often been based on user-centred or task-centred design methodologies, with some success. These methodologies are also useful for guiding the development of multi-user CSCW applications whenever the basic characteristics of the users, or the type of tasks for which the system is being designed are identifiable. The effectiveness of these methodologies as a basis for the design of virtual meeting environments for supporting community-based activities, on the other hand, is rather limited. This is mainly due to the fact that for such systems it is not generally possible to identify the user or task requirements, as these vary considerably from one community to another, or even within the same community over a period of time. New methodologies need to be devised, or existing methodologies have to be modified, to direct the development of virtual environments for which the characteristics of the users or their activities are not known in advance. This paper introduces the concept of information-centred design. Information-centred design, though not fully devised yet, focuses on the identification of the type of information, as well as the way it is collected and utilized by the users of a virtual meeting environment. This pool of information, which plays an important role in facilitating interaction and communication between the members of a community, could be defined as their communal memory.     

L’adaptation des modèles de production dans les pays émergents L’exemple de l’industrie automobile en Argentine

How to test for the existence of a new model of production based on the firm lending an ear to customer demands and valuing the individual and collective intelligence of its work force? The facts for putting this model to the test of reality come from an analysis of two Argentinean automobile-makers, subsidiaries of Toyota and Volkswagen. Various aspects of their organization policy provide evidence of their capacity for making adaptations by “hybridizing” the parent firm’s model with the rationales inherent in the network of local actors (suppliers and labor unions, in particular). These firms are open systems with a narrow margin of maneuver. — Special issue: Latin America.     

Recruitment of foreign male and female fighters to Jihad: Morocco’s multifaceted counter-terror strategy

Field research on ‘young Moroccan Jihadists in Syria and Iraq from northern Morocco’ unexpectedly revealed the mundane factors behind their recruitment represented in the self-realization and the search for heroism, adventure and money, were the main reasons for the recruitment of young people in northern Morocco terrorist organizations, especially the Daesh. The religious factor is secondary. To combat terrorism and extremism which is spreading in the MENA region requires political will. Appropriate laws should be enacted as soon as possible and policies must be implemented to ensure border control, the closure of financing ports, propaganda platforms, anti-addiction, etc.     

La transition théâtrale dans l'ex-RDA : vers la recherche de nouvelles formes de régulation organisationnelle

Organized around a very dense set of public institutions, the theater world in the former German Democratic Republic has undergone major changes since reunification. New organizational models have come into being, often imported from West Germany, that jeopardize the foundations of theater practices in the East. In East Germany, people working in theater were strongly protected: homogeneous training, lifetime employment, the stability of forms of artistic cooperation, etc. Since reunification, a new division of labor and a new human resource management have been imposed in public theaters. The profession’s rules are changing as the itineraries of theater people are being individualized. The diversification of the theater world makes public institutions fragile. On the basis of field work in Saxony, questions are raised about how public theaters are being recomposed in the East. Attention is paid to individual and collective movements and to the movements of organizations.     

NEW COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES - A conduit for social inclusion

There has an outpouring of energy and creativity into ways of using information and communications technologies (ICT) and the information society (IS) to create inclusion, as an opportunity to tackle, reduce and even prevent social exclusion. This article is based on examining over 40 projects which constitute positive examples of applications of new technologies, by public authorities, private agencies and community groups, to reduce the disadvantage experienced by the more excluded groups in our society.