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Patiency Is Not a Virtue: The Design of Intelligent Systems and Systems of Ethics
No full textThe question of whether AI systems such as robots can or should be afforded moral agency or patiency is not one amenable either to discovery or simple reasoning, because we as societies constantly reconstruct our artefacts, including our ethical systems. Consequently, the place of AI systems in society is a matter of normative, not descriptive ethics. Here I start from a functionalist assumption, that ethics is the set of behaviour that maintains a society. This assumption allows me to exploit the theoretical biology of sociality and autonomy to explain our moral intuitions. From this grounding I extend to consider possible ethics for maintaining either human- or of artefact-centred societies. I conclude that while constructing AI systems as either moral agents or patients is possible, neither is desirable. In particular, I argue that we are unlikely to construct a coherent ethics in which it it is ethical to afford AI moral subjectivity. We are therefore obliged not to build AI we are obliged to
Agreeing on an EU ETS minimum price to foster solidarity, subsidiarity and efficiency in the EU
No full textData sharing: A European challenge? Why the EU should make data sharing a piority
Get PDFData sharing refers to transactions in which personal or nonpersonal data from the public or private sector is made available for other organisations (public or private) for use and re-use. Data sharing can occur for free or data can be made available for profit. Data sharing in the EU has a lot of untapped value potential both for individuals and for the economy at large. New rules and institutions that can enable data sharing in a trusted manner and give citizens more control over when and how they share their private data need to be built at the European level. The question is how? The EU should work towards a stronger culture of data sharing and help build the necessary infrastructure with a focus on two areas: Building infrastructure for data sharing and access for companies and extending the right to portability of personal data (Art. 20 GDPR)
Who Governs 4.0? Varieties of Smart Cities
No full textResearch on smart cities is still at an early stage. The conjecture of this article is that smart city strategies and their impacts will inevitably vary across contexts; however, the debate still lacks an analytical toolkit that guides the exploration of such varieties (and similarities) of smart cities. Combining existing research on the governance of smart cities with theories of business–state relations from political economy, this article develops an analytical framework and typology that captures varieties (and similarities) of smart city policies and governance. We apply this framework to four illustrative cases: Prague, Barcelona, Berlin, and Rio de Janeiro
EU Actors under pressure: politicisation and depoliticisation as strategic responses
No full textThis contribution conceptualises bottom-up politicisation in Europe’s multi-level system. EU-level actors, we argue, respond strategically to the functional and political pressures ‘travelling up’ from the member states. Perceiving domestic dissensus as either constraining or enabling, actors display both self-restraint and assertiveness in their responses. Motivated by the survival of the EU as a system ‘under attack’, and by the preservation of their own substantive and procedural powers, actors choose to either politicise or depoliticise decision-making, behaviour and policy outcomes at the supranational level. As a collection, this Special Issue demonstrate that the choices actors make ‘under stress’ at the EU-level – ranging from ‘restrained depoliticisation’ to ‘assertive politicisation’ – are, indeed, conditional on how bottom-up pressures are perceived and processed
Automated Data Collection with R: A Practical Guide to Web Scraping and Text Mining
No full textA hands on guide to web scraping and text mining for both beginners and experienced users of R
Introduces fundamental concepts of the main architecture of the web and databases and covers HTTP, HTML, XML, JSON, SQL.
Provides basic techniques to query web documents and data sets (XPath and regular expressions).
An extensive set of exercises are presented to guide the reader through each technique.
Explores both supervised and unsupervised techniques as well as advanced techniques such as data scraping and text management.
Case studies are featured throughout along with examples for each technique presented.
R code and solutions to exercises featured in the book are provided on a supporting website