Maria Isabel Aldinhas Ferreira - Designing Autonomous Tools: Technical and Ethical Challenges

Human beings share with other species an inherent capacity for tool making, the capacity to devise and give form to entities whose functioning responds to the problems posed by their being in the world. However, contrary to other species, in human beings this capacity for toolmaking has been evolving, benefiting from an effect of experience accumulation and knowledge transfer throughout generations, in a process that is inherently human (Ferreira, 2022). Artifacts, particularly tools, have consequently evolved defining an historical timeline that can also be seen as contextually determined.
Tools were primarily body extensions powered by human muscles and even later, first with the introduction of the steam engine and afterwards with the introduction of electricity, tools depended on human action to operate them. In the second half of the 20th century the revolution brought about by ICT technologies and their developments has allowed the creation of tools that have gained autonomy and no longer depend on humans for their functioning. Digital tools, namely AI powered systems, can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments.