James Brusseau (PhD, Philosophy) is author of books, articles, and digital media in the history of philosophy and ethics. He has taught in Europe, Mexico, and currently at Pace University near his home in New York City. As Director of AI Ethics Site, a research institute currently incubating at Pace University, he explores the human experience of artificial intelligence.www.linkedin.com/in/james-brusseau
According to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, big data reality means, “The days of having a different ... more According to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, big data reality means, “The days of having a different image for your co-workers and for others are coming to an end, which is good because having multiple identities represents a lack of integrity.” Two sets of questions follow. One centers on technology and asks how big data mechanisms collapse our various selves (work-self, family-self, romantic-self) into one personality. The second question set shifts from technology to ethics by asking whether we want the kind of integrity that Zuckerberg lauds, and that big data technology enables. The negative response is explored by sketching three ethical conceptions of selfhood that recommend personal identity be understood as dis-integrating. The success of the strategies partially depends upon an undermining use of big data platforms
ABSTRACTBrand trust is an integral component of brand identity. Consumer suspicion may undermine ... more ABSTRACTBrand trust is an integral component of brand identity. Consumer suspicion may undermine the building of brand trust through attempts to incorporate corporate social responsibility (CSR) into brand identity. One cause is businesses conforming to a definition of CSR that does not fit their operation and culture. One response is to set authenticity at the center of CSR discussions by broadening the ethics used to conceive a business's role in society and international commerce. This paper uses philosophical tools to construct a model for authenticity-based corporate social responsibility.Keywords: CSR branding, ethics, CSR, greenwashing, conformity, authenticity, philosophy, marketingINTRODUCTIONConducting business on an international scale increasingly requires businesses to be clear about their obligations to society beyond simply making profit (Dos Santos 2009). Businesses are commonly expected to create mission and vision statements that are shared with employees, inve...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to greatly improve the delivery of healthcare and ... more Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to greatly improve the delivery of healthcare and other services that advance population health and wellbeing. However, the use of AI in healthcare also brings potential risks that may cause unintended harm. To guide future developments in AI, the High-Level Expert Group on AI set up by the European Commission (EC), recently published ethics guidelines for what it terms “trustworthy” AI. These guidelines are aimed at a variety of stakeholders, especially guiding practitioners toward more ethical and more robust applications of AI. In line with efforts of the EC, AI ethics scholarship focuses increasingly on converting abstract principles into actionable recommendations. However, the interpretation, relevance, and implementation of trustworthy AI depend on the domain and the context in which the AI system is used. The main contribution of this paper is to demonstrate how to use the general AI HLEG trustworthy AI guidelines in practice in...
The relation between thinking and truth in philosophy is explored in terms of this question: whic... more The relation between thinking and truth in philosophy is explored in terms of this question: which one serves the other? The essay argues that a conception of philosophy as truth serving thought can be perceived in the work of French Nietzschean philosophers
This paper documents how an ethically aligned co-design methodology ensures trustworthiness in th... more This paper documents how an ethically aligned co-design methodology ensures trustworthiness in the early design phase of an artificial intelligence (AI) system component for healthcare. The system explains decisions made by deep learning networks analyzing images of skin lesions. The co-design of trustworthy AI developed here used a holistic approach rather than a static ethical checklist and required a multidisciplinary team of experts working with the AI designers and their managers. Ethical, legal, and technical issues potentially arising from the future use of the AI system were investigated. This paper is a first report on co-designing in the early design phase. Our results can also serve as guidance for other early-phase AI-similar tool developments.
Decadence in philosophy is defined in the relation between thinking and truth, and explored as a ... more Decadence in philosophy is defined in the relation between thinking and truth, and explored as a conflict between Richard Rorty and Gilles Deleuze
Las tecnologias sociales contemporaneas que entran en el lugar de trabajo hacen desaparecer el se... more Las tecnologias sociales contemporaneas que entran en el lugar de trabajo hacen desaparecer el sentido tradicional del espacio que rodea al trabajo. En este articulo se describe e ilustra esta desaparicion, situandola en el contexto de la distincion teorica de Gilles Deleuze entre sociedades disciplinarias y sociedades de control, y se investigan algunos problemas eticos que se derivan de la desaparicion del espacio.
On a good day in the business ethics classroom discussion charges forward; students have read the... more On a good day in the business ethics classroom discussion charges forward; students have read the assigned case study, they’re engaged by the conflict and want to work through it. Then, there’s a bad day: students didn’t bother to do the reading and the hour sags listlessly. The key to going the first way is case studies that students want to read, and The Business Ethics Workshop by James Brusseau provides them with reality and engagement. Reality: No stilted and contrived stories about Steve Smith and Jane Jones. Excerpts from blogs and newspapers bring the weight—and provocation—of the world as it’s actually happening to the classroom. Engagement: Students want to read pages touching on their own anxieties, desires and aspirations. Because the textbook responds on that level without sacrificing intellectual gravity, class gets powered by student interest while thoughtfully penetrating to the core of ethical issues. Another key to a successful textbook is clarity in the expository...
Today’s ethics of privacy is largely dedicated to defending personal information from big data te... more Today’s ethics of privacy is largely dedicated to defending personal information from big data technologies. This essay goes in the other direction. It considers the struggle to be lost, and explores two strategies for living after privacy is gone. First, total exposure embraces privacy’s decline, and then contributes to the process with transparency. All personal information is shared without reservation. The resulting ethics is explored through a big data version of Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine thought experiment. Second, transient existence responds to privacy’s loss by ceaselessly generating new personal identities, which translates into constantly producing temporarily unviolated private information. The ethics is explored through Gilles Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference applied in linguistic terms to the formation of the self. Comparing the exposure and transience alternatives leads to the conclusion that today’s big data reality splits the traditional ethical link bet...
AI ethics increasingly focuses on converting abstract principles into practical action. This case... more AI ethics increasingly focuses on converting abstract principles into practical action. This case study documents nine lessons for the conversion learned while performing an ethics evaluation on a deployed AI medical device. The utilized ethical principles were adopted from the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, and the conversion into practical insights and recommendations was accomplished by an independent team composed of philosophers, technical and medical experts.
LINEAR TIME CHARACTERIZES HISTORIES. Not only the anonymous stories of cities and countries, but ... more LINEAR TIME CHARACTERIZES HISTORIES. Not only the anonymous stories of cities and countries, but also individual histories-biographies. In Proust: The Early Years, George Painter describes Proust being driven through Illiers (Combray) with his ageing father. The carriage grates slowly on the cobblestone square. Father points at a small shop front, the store where grandfather sold candles and tapers. Son nods acknowledgment. A twist of smoke diffuses above the roof's single chimney. Father remembers rarely having coal. (3) It is a long way from these store-top rooms to the modern Paris apartment they live in. But the carriage can never be pulled far enough to be away. Departure, teleology, arrival, project, progress; the words surround linear time. Their temporality depends upon an unbroken continuity stretching between beginning and end. Nietzsche calls this cursive time. It is the time of writing. The temporality a sentence pursues in conveying meaning.
Augustine's Metaphysics stretches from Nothing to the Selfsame, Truth. Imperative for underst... more Augustine's Metaphysics stretches from Nothing to the Selfsame, Truth. Imperative for understanding the Confessions is the ceaseless realization that no negative exists in Augustine's world. Nothing is less than zero. Against the Manichean schizophrenia of positive and negative, evil and good, Aug ustine imagines events and the world itself to be laid out along the plane of concrete being. The pear stealing episode represents the negative end of this continuum, and presents the Confession's first concrete example of an action that can be understood as Nothing. It is not, of course, that the action itself did not exist. The theft was as physically real as the conversion experience or any of the other episodes suffered through the autobiograph ical chapters. Given that the thievery did exist, the key for understanding Augustine's evil lies in distinguishing the aspect from which a certain example of it—the pear stealing episode—is Nothing. O. W. Holmes wondered how Augustine could have remained so leaden in a boy's mistake. Augustine's relation of the theft is for the most part a string of questions that sometimes occasion blatantly inadequate answers and other times no answers at all. Would the pears have been stolen had Augustine been alone? Could the community of 'thieves' be blamed en masse, was the individual in the community responsible, was he entirely responsible ... Indeed, it becomes difficult not to sympathize with Holmes frustration at being dragged through this unresolvable 'tangle' in which Augustine's indulgent self reflection comes closer to Monty Python humour than reasons and a reasonable answer.
According to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, big data reality means, “The days of having a different ... more According to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, big data reality means, “The days of having a different image for your co-workers and for others are coming to an end, which is good because having multiple identities represents a lack of integrity.” Two sets of questions follow. One centers on technology and asks how big data mechanisms collapse our various selves (work-self, family-self, romantic-self) into one personality. The second question set shifts from technology to ethics by asking whether we want the kind of integrity that Zuckerberg lauds, and that big data technology enables. The negative response is explored by sketching three ethical conceptions of selfhood that recommend personal identity be understood as dis-integrating. The success of the strategies partially depends upon an undermining use of big data platforms
ABSTRACTBrand trust is an integral component of brand identity. Consumer suspicion may undermine ... more ABSTRACTBrand trust is an integral component of brand identity. Consumer suspicion may undermine the building of brand trust through attempts to incorporate corporate social responsibility (CSR) into brand identity. One cause is businesses conforming to a definition of CSR that does not fit their operation and culture. One response is to set authenticity at the center of CSR discussions by broadening the ethics used to conceive a business's role in society and international commerce. This paper uses philosophical tools to construct a model for authenticity-based corporate social responsibility.Keywords: CSR branding, ethics, CSR, greenwashing, conformity, authenticity, philosophy, marketingINTRODUCTIONConducting business on an international scale increasingly requires businesses to be clear about their obligations to society beyond simply making profit (Dos Santos 2009). Businesses are commonly expected to create mission and vision statements that are shared with employees, inve...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to greatly improve the delivery of healthcare and ... more Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to greatly improve the delivery of healthcare and other services that advance population health and wellbeing. However, the use of AI in healthcare also brings potential risks that may cause unintended harm. To guide future developments in AI, the High-Level Expert Group on AI set up by the European Commission (EC), recently published ethics guidelines for what it terms “trustworthy” AI. These guidelines are aimed at a variety of stakeholders, especially guiding practitioners toward more ethical and more robust applications of AI. In line with efforts of the EC, AI ethics scholarship focuses increasingly on converting abstract principles into actionable recommendations. However, the interpretation, relevance, and implementation of trustworthy AI depend on the domain and the context in which the AI system is used. The main contribution of this paper is to demonstrate how to use the general AI HLEG trustworthy AI guidelines in practice in...
The relation between thinking and truth in philosophy is explored in terms of this question: whic... more The relation between thinking and truth in philosophy is explored in terms of this question: which one serves the other? The essay argues that a conception of philosophy as truth serving thought can be perceived in the work of French Nietzschean philosophers
This paper documents how an ethically aligned co-design methodology ensures trustworthiness in th... more This paper documents how an ethically aligned co-design methodology ensures trustworthiness in the early design phase of an artificial intelligence (AI) system component for healthcare. The system explains decisions made by deep learning networks analyzing images of skin lesions. The co-design of trustworthy AI developed here used a holistic approach rather than a static ethical checklist and required a multidisciplinary team of experts working with the AI designers and their managers. Ethical, legal, and technical issues potentially arising from the future use of the AI system were investigated. This paper is a first report on co-designing in the early design phase. Our results can also serve as guidance for other early-phase AI-similar tool developments.
Decadence in philosophy is defined in the relation between thinking and truth, and explored as a ... more Decadence in philosophy is defined in the relation between thinking and truth, and explored as a conflict between Richard Rorty and Gilles Deleuze
Las tecnologias sociales contemporaneas que entran en el lugar de trabajo hacen desaparecer el se... more Las tecnologias sociales contemporaneas que entran en el lugar de trabajo hacen desaparecer el sentido tradicional del espacio que rodea al trabajo. En este articulo se describe e ilustra esta desaparicion, situandola en el contexto de la distincion teorica de Gilles Deleuze entre sociedades disciplinarias y sociedades de control, y se investigan algunos problemas eticos que se derivan de la desaparicion del espacio.
On a good day in the business ethics classroom discussion charges forward; students have read the... more On a good day in the business ethics classroom discussion charges forward; students have read the assigned case study, they’re engaged by the conflict and want to work through it. Then, there’s a bad day: students didn’t bother to do the reading and the hour sags listlessly. The key to going the first way is case studies that students want to read, and The Business Ethics Workshop by James Brusseau provides them with reality and engagement. Reality: No stilted and contrived stories about Steve Smith and Jane Jones. Excerpts from blogs and newspapers bring the weight—and provocation—of the world as it’s actually happening to the classroom. Engagement: Students want to read pages touching on their own anxieties, desires and aspirations. Because the textbook responds on that level without sacrificing intellectual gravity, class gets powered by student interest while thoughtfully penetrating to the core of ethical issues. Another key to a successful textbook is clarity in the expository...
Today’s ethics of privacy is largely dedicated to defending personal information from big data te... more Today’s ethics of privacy is largely dedicated to defending personal information from big data technologies. This essay goes in the other direction. It considers the struggle to be lost, and explores two strategies for living after privacy is gone. First, total exposure embraces privacy’s decline, and then contributes to the process with transparency. All personal information is shared without reservation. The resulting ethics is explored through a big data version of Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine thought experiment. Second, transient existence responds to privacy’s loss by ceaselessly generating new personal identities, which translates into constantly producing temporarily unviolated private information. The ethics is explored through Gilles Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference applied in linguistic terms to the formation of the self. Comparing the exposure and transience alternatives leads to the conclusion that today’s big data reality splits the traditional ethical link bet...
AI ethics increasingly focuses on converting abstract principles into practical action. This case... more AI ethics increasingly focuses on converting abstract principles into practical action. This case study documents nine lessons for the conversion learned while performing an ethics evaluation on a deployed AI medical device. The utilized ethical principles were adopted from the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, and the conversion into practical insights and recommendations was accomplished by an independent team composed of philosophers, technical and medical experts.
LINEAR TIME CHARACTERIZES HISTORIES. Not only the anonymous stories of cities and countries, but ... more LINEAR TIME CHARACTERIZES HISTORIES. Not only the anonymous stories of cities and countries, but also individual histories-biographies. In Proust: The Early Years, George Painter describes Proust being driven through Illiers (Combray) with his ageing father. The carriage grates slowly on the cobblestone square. Father points at a small shop front, the store where grandfather sold candles and tapers. Son nods acknowledgment. A twist of smoke diffuses above the roof's single chimney. Father remembers rarely having coal. (3) It is a long way from these store-top rooms to the modern Paris apartment they live in. But the carriage can never be pulled far enough to be away. Departure, teleology, arrival, project, progress; the words surround linear time. Their temporality depends upon an unbroken continuity stretching between beginning and end. Nietzsche calls this cursive time. It is the time of writing. The temporality a sentence pursues in conveying meaning.
Augustine's Metaphysics stretches from Nothing to the Selfsame, Truth. Imperative for underst... more Augustine's Metaphysics stretches from Nothing to the Selfsame, Truth. Imperative for understanding the Confessions is the ceaseless realization that no negative exists in Augustine's world. Nothing is less than zero. Against the Manichean schizophrenia of positive and negative, evil and good, Aug ustine imagines events and the world itself to be laid out along the plane of concrete being. The pear stealing episode represents the negative end of this continuum, and presents the Confession's first concrete example of an action that can be understood as Nothing. It is not, of course, that the action itself did not exist. The theft was as physically real as the conversion experience or any of the other episodes suffered through the autobiograph ical chapters. Given that the thievery did exist, the key for understanding Augustine's evil lies in distinguishing the aspect from which a certain example of it—the pear stealing episode—is Nothing. O. W. Holmes wondered how Augustine could have remained so leaden in a boy's mistake. Augustine's relation of the theft is for the most part a string of questions that sometimes occasion blatantly inadequate answers and other times no answers at all. Would the pears have been stolen had Augustine been alone? Could the community of 'thieves' be blamed en masse, was the individual in the community responsible, was he entirely responsible ... Indeed, it becomes difficult not to sympathize with Holmes frustration at being dragged through this unresolvable 'tangle' in which Augustine's indulgent self reflection comes closer to Monty Python humour than reasons and a reasonable answer.
Isolated Experiences: Gilles Deleuze and the Solitudes of Reversed Platonism, 1997
Traversing the genres of philosophy and literature, this book elaborates Deleuze's notion of diff... more Traversing the genres of philosophy and literature, this book elaborates Deleuze's notion of difference, conceives certain individuals as embodying difference, and applies these conceptions to their writings.
Decadence in philosophy means evaluating truth claims exclusively in terms of provocation, in ter... more Decadence in philosophy means evaluating truth claims exclusively in terms of provocation, in terms of how vigorously they generate subsequent thought. The best truth/book/essay/video doesn’t settle questions, but produces still more thought, writing, production. Decadence privileges the history of thinking over the history of truth. Thought’s history runs from base servility (the best thinking eliminates the need for itself by culminating in universal truth, Platonism), to dialectical servility (the ceaseless interplay of interpretation as a verb, and as a noun, Nietzscheanism), to decadence, where thought overthrows truth’s independent value and incorporates assertions into its own expression and acceleration. Decadence is defined as truth serving thought, and practiced when the only reason we have truths is to generate more thinking. While the definition structures well historically, the claim in Decadence of the French Nietzsche is not that there are serial epochs – Platonism followed by Nietzscheanism followed by Decadence – but that an esoteric vein of decadence runs through philosophy’s history.
One objection to conventional AI ethics is that it slows innovation. This presentation responds b... more One objection to conventional AI ethics is that it slows innovation. This presentation responds by reconfiguring ethics as an innovation accelerator. The critical elements develop from a contrast between Stability AI's Diffusion and OpenAI's Dall-E. By analyzing the divergent values underlying their opposed strategies for development and deployment, five conceptions are identified as common to acceleration ethics. Uncertainty is understood as positive and encouraging, rather than discouraging. Innovation is conceived as intrinsically valuable, instead of worthwhile only as mediated by social effects. AI problems are solved by more AI, not less. Permissions and restrictions governing AI emerge from a decentralized process, instead of a unified authority. The work of ethics is embedded in AI development and application, instead of functioning from outside. Together, these attitudes and practices remake ethics as provoking rather than restraining artificial intelligence.
What is human experience after the end of privacy? What conveniences and pleasures remain, and wh... more What is human experience after the end of privacy? What conveniences and pleasures remain, and what do we need to surrender to receive them? These fundamental questions rise at the intersection of AI, big data, and contemporary humanism, and they are explored from a philosophical ethics perspective within Nozick’s experience machine thought experiment.
Mark Zuckerberg states, “You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your... more Mark Zuckerberg states, “You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are coming to an end. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” This presentation shows why social media and big data platforms tend to create integrated identities. Then, on the ethical level and against Zuckerberg, two real-world strategies for escaping the integration are developed.
1. The insurance paradox
2. Always already time Health: Cured before symptoms Consumer goods: De... more 1. The insurance paradox 2. Always already time Health: Cured before symptoms Consumer goods: Delivered before wanting 3. Euphoria convenience (is it pleasure?) 4. Costs: Privacy, freedom, identity 5. What is Vandalism in Big Data Reality 6. Corrupt from inside 7. LinkedIn example 8. Tinder example
Derrida Today Conference, 2014 Fordham University, New York, 2014
The difference between Derrida and Deleuze has been debated in terms of their understandings and ... more The difference between Derrida and Deleuze has been debated in terms of their understandings and uses of the historical distinction between Being and beings. Daniel W. Smith intersects with the question when discussing transcendence and immanence. Clair Colebrook intersects when discussing materialism. Paul Patton intersects when distinguishing the unconditioned and conditioned. This essay moves along with their ideas, and contributes to the discussion by re-inscribing the debate in terms of nouns and verbs. The conclusion suggests that the noun/verb prism yields a view of the question about Being and beings that fits most easily into Smith’s conception of the relation between Derrida and Deleuze. Thematically, the essay is framed by a line from Derrida’s eulogy for Deleuze, and by a question. The line is Derrida recollecting Deleuze commenting that, "It’s painful for me to see you spending so much time on the College International de Philosophie. I would rather you wrote..." The question addressed to the prolific Derrida and Deleuze is: “How much writing is enough?” Why do individuals with limited time who have already written numerous and thick volumes of philosophy choose to go ahead and write more?
The relation between thinking and truth in philosophy is explored in terms of this question: whic... more The relation between thinking and truth in philosophy is explored in terms of this question: which one serves the other? The essay argues that a conception of philosophy as truth serving thought can be perceived in the work of French Nietzschean philosophers.
Does AI conform to humans, or will we conform to AI? An ethical evaluation of AI-intensive compan... more Does AI conform to humans, or will we conform to AI? An ethical evaluation of AI-intensive companies will allow investors to knowledgeably participate in the decision. The evaluation is built from nine performance indicators that can be analyzed and scored to reflect a technology's human-centering. When summed, the scores convert into objective investment guidance. The strategy of incorporating ethics into financial decisions will be recognizable to participants in environmental, social, and governance investing, however, this paper argues that conventional ESG frameworks are inadequate for AI-intensive companies. To fully account for contemporary technology, the following categories of evaluation will be developed and featured as vital investing criteria: autonomy, dignity, privacy, performance. With these priorities established, the larger goal is a model for humanitarian investing in AI-intensive companies that is intellectually robust, manageable for analysts, useful for portfolio managers, and credible for investors.
Uploads
Papers by JAMES BRUSSEAU
2. Always already time Health: Cured before symptoms Consumer goods: Delivered before wanting
3. Euphoria convenience (is it pleasure?)
4. Costs: Privacy, freedom, identity
5. What is Vandalism in Big Data Reality
6. Corrupt from inside
7. LinkedIn example
8. Tinder example