Donald Gillies

Following the advances in AI produced by the deep learning revolution (2012 to present), AI now has a whole range of applications in industry and commerce. Unfortunately, many of these applications are widely considered to be morally wrong. This situation is illustrated by the example of deepfake pornography. Other examples are more nuanced and there is argument about whether they are morally wrong or not. This is illustrated by the example of targeted advertising which has been defended as acceptable. The arguments for and against targeted advertising are discussed. An account is given of an interesting experiment by Janet Vertesi in which she tried to keep her pregnancy a secret from marketing companies and ended up by being suspected of criminal activity. The conclusion is that targeted advertising is bad and should be abolished.

The aim of this paper is to consider whether critical rationalism has any ideas which could usefully be applied to the internet.  Today we tend to take the internet for granted and it is easy to forget that it was only about two decades ago that it began to be used to any significant extent. Accordingly in section 1 of the paper, there is a brief consideration of the history of the internet.  At first sight this makes it looks implausible that any of Popper’s ideas could be applicable to the internet, since Popper died before the internet came into general use.  However, section 2 argues that Popper’s theory of World 3 does apply very well to the internet.  This application is significant because, as shown in section 3, it leads to the problem of misinformation, which is one of the most significant problems generated by the internet.  In section 4 there is an attempt to solve this problem using ideas taken from Popper’s epistemology. It is argued that there should be changes in education designed to prepare students for the internet age. Teaching in the internet age should focus on presenting to the students not just the accepted theories but also the evidence on which they are based. An illustration of how this might be done is given by considering an example from science teaching, namely the teaching of Newtonian mechanics in the last years of school or first years of university.