Research themes

Autonomy, authenticity, and recommendation algorithms. Algorithmic recommenders increasingly shape experience, from entertainment and work, to encountering ideas and people. Because future interests are predicted from our past preferences, recommenders function by recycling who we have already been, and that recursivity raises new questions about personal identity, freedom, and authenticity. There are also questions about breaking out of the algorithmic feedback loop: How can we diverge from who we have been? What does that mean in lived experience? How could it be accomplished theoretically, technically, and practically?

Acceleration AI ethics applies to the debate between innovation and safety in technological development. Are innovation’s accompanying problems best solved with still more innovation? Or, should the guarantee of safety precede technological advance? The acceleration response is the first, and the work of acceleration ethics is to investigate the fundamental values supporting the approach.

AI ethics evaluations are pursued through three steps. First, a socio-technical scenario is developed to explain the AI tool in language that crosses applicable domains. In the case of a medical tool, the domains would include ethics, computer science, medicine, law, and business. Second, the evaluation is executed by applying the ethical values to the tool, and by applying the tool’s use to the values. Finally, a report documents the process and may propose recommendations.

Decadence of the French Nietzsche argues that the relation between thinking and truth reverses in some aspects of post-Nietzschean philosophy. We do not have thought to reach truth, instead, we have truths to catalyze more thinking. For decadents, every philosophic conclusion is valued purely in terms of its ability to generate more thought. It is unclear whether this is a desirable development. Deleuze is a principle figure, as well as Derrida and Foucault. Finally, the concept of decadence is investigated in terms of human experience.

Isolated Experiences argues for the radical discontinuity of personal identity, and the emergence of new personal identities, within the larger context of Gilles Deleuze’s reversal of Platonism. The theoretical foundation is the metaphysics of difference as developed by Deleuze, Georges Bataille, and Nietzsche. Practically, the experience of discontinuity in personal identity is explored through literary works, including the writings of the nomadic traveler Isabelle Eberhardt.