Amber Ross
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy
Areas of Interest/Research
Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics, Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
Current Research
My research spans philosophy of mind and consciousness, metaphysics, and Ethics of AI. This Spring, I am also co-editing a special issue of the journal Multisensory Perception, focusing on philosophical issues in that field.
In Ethics and AI, I am currently working on a paper focusing on the “Black-Box” or Opacity Problem in Artificial Intelligence. Presently, those who are involved in developing our most powerful machine learning algorithms do not fully understand how these AI systems produce the results that they produce. Yet we currently rely on many opaque AI systems make important decisions for us individually and as a society. My paper focuses on this issue and what our use of this opaque technology reveals about our values, especially in the context of incarceration and parole.
The the areas of philosophy of mind and metaphysics, I am currently developing a book-length work- in stages- defending a Narrative theory of Self that does not require an individual to possess language in order to be properly considered to have a Self in the fullest sense of the term. This reinterpretation of the Narrative theory of Self would allow for the selfhood of all individuals to lie along a continuous spectrum, rather than reinforcing an artificial divide between the selves of language users and those without language. The notion of non-linguistic Narrative Selfhood I propose will likely consider pre-linguistic humans as well as many non-human animals to have Selves in the fullest sense, and in principle could extend selfhood to certain advanced AI systems as well.
Contact Information
Email:amber.ross@ufl.edu
Phone: (352) 273-5555
Office: 301 Griffin-Floyd Hall
Office Hours: 3-4 M & W
Mailing address: