publications
2023
- Towards a post-work "utopia": a political and legal exercise in imaginationAnastasia SiapkaIn Shaping Utopia Through Law – How the law does (not) provide an answer to societal challenges , Jun 2023
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (“AI”) and robotics have rekindled fears of a workless future. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, dystopian headlines portend that a robot apocalypse will “steal”, “kill”, or “destroy” humans’ jobs on a mass scale, thereby framing automation as a threat that must be counteracted by law and policy. Conversely, drawing on Aristotelian moral and political philosophy, the prospect of automating human work through AI and the consequent vision of a flourishing-centred, post-work society emerge as not merely acceptable but actively desirable. Nonetheless, this vision of a society in which AI liberates humans from toil, allowing them to engage in those activities that they deem intrinsically valuable, risks being labelled as “utopian”. To counter this objection, this paper advances four claims that seek to highlight the value of utopian thinking while questioning the very labelling of the purported post-work society as “utopian”. In the event that these four claims are accepted, however, the objection that the construal of a flourishing-centred society as of interest to the legal order would itself be utopian remains valid. For this reason, this paper resorts to “virtue jurisprudence” or “the aretaic turn” in law. As a normative theory that invokes Aristotle’s ethics to address key questions in law, virtue jurisprudence argues that the law should aim to ensure the necessary preconditions for human flourishing. Applying this theory to the “future of work” debate yields the question of how AI automation would be regulated if human flourishing were, indeed, the law’s ultimate objective. The paper concludes that, far from being neutral, pejorative characterisations of future scenarios as “utopian” should not be taken at face value, particularly in relation to the “future of work” debate. Rather, political and legal argumentation must provide space for imaginative, utopian considerations alongside more realistic or pragmatic ones.
- AI-driven Automation as a Pre-condition for EudaimoniaAnastasia SiapkaIn Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society , Aug 2023
The debate surrounding the ‘future of work’ is saturated with alarmist warnings about the loss of work as an intrinsically valuable activity. Instead, the present doctoral research approaches this debate from the perspective of human flourishing (eudaimonia). It articulates a neo-Aristotelian interpretation according to which the prospect of mass AI-driven automation, far from being a threat, is rather desirable insofar as it facilitates humans’ flourishing and, subsequently, their engagement in leisure. Drawing on virtue jurisprudence, this research further explores what this desirability may imply for the current legal order.
2022
- Towards a Feminist Metaethics of AIAnastasia SiapkaIn Proceedings of the 2022 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society , Jul 2022
The proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has sparked an overwhelming number of AI ethics guidelines, boards and codes of conduct. These outputs primarily analyse competing theories, principles and values for AI development and deployment. However, as a series of recent problematic incidents about AI ethics/ethicists demonstrate, this orientation is insufficient. Before proceeding to evaluate other professions, AI ethicists should critically evaluate their own; yet, such an evaluation should be more explicitly and systematically undertaken in the literature. I argue that these insufficiencies could be mitigated by developing a research agenda for a feminist metaethics of AI. Contrary to traditional metaethics, which reflects on the nature of morality and moral judgements in a non-normative way, feminist metaethics expands its scope to ask not only what ethics is but also what our engagement with it should be like. Applying this perspective to the context of AI, I suggest that a feminist metaethics of AI would examine: (i) the continuity between theory and action in AI ethics; (ii) the real-life effects of AI ethics; (iii) the role and profile of those involved in AI ethics; and (iv) the effects of AI on power relations through methods that pay attention to context, emotions and narrative.
2021
- Digital Tools and COVID-19: Shifting Public–Private BoundariesAnton Vedder , Anastasia Siapka, and 2 more authorsPhilosophical Papers, Sep 2021
In this paper, we attempt to provide starting points for a discussion on immediate and longer term consequences of COVID-19-induced uses of digital technologies for the distinction of the public and the private spheres. We start with clarifying definitions of the public and the private spheres in relation to the concept of privacy. What is considered private is at least in part contextually determined by conventions and social, political, economic and technological developments. From this perspective, we set out to critically evaluate the COVID-19-induced large-scale introduction of new digital tools in two essential areas of life: the workplace and education. We discuss the role of technology and its immediate concomitant legal or ethical challenges. The paper concludes with reflections on the possible longer-term normative effects of the use of digital tools in the context of the COVID-19 containment on the demarcation of the public and private spheres.
- Bleeding data: the case of fertility and menstruation tracking appsAnastasia Siapka, and Elisabetta BiasinInternet Policy Review, Dec 2021
Journalists, non-profits and consumer organisations, as well as the authors’ first-hand review of relevant privacy policies reveal that fertility and menstruation tracking apps (FMTs) collect and share an excessive array of data. Through doctrinal legal research, we evaluate this data processing in light of data and consumer protection law but find the commonly invoked concepts of ‘vulnerability’, ‘consent’ and ‘transparency’ insufficient to alleviate power imbalances. Instead, drawing on a feminist understanding of work and the autonomist ‘social factory’, we argue that users perform unpaid, even gendered, consumer labour in the digital realm and explore the potential of a demand for wages.