Artificial intelligence (AI) is a radically transformative technology (or system of technologies) that created new existential possibilities and new standards of well-being in human societies. In this article, I argue that to properly understand the increasingly important role AI plays in our society, we must consider its impacts on social justice. For this reason, I propose to conceptualize AI’s transformative role and its socio-political implications through the lens of the theory of social justice known as the Capability Approach. According to the approach, a just society must put its members in a position to acquire and exercise a series of basic capabilities and provide them with the necessary means for these capabilities to be actively realized. Because AI is re-shaping the very definition of some of these basic capabilities, I conclude that AI itself should be considered among the conditions of possession and realization of the capabilities it transforms. In other words, access to AI—in the many forms this access can take—is necessary for social justice.

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Can philosophical theories of perception defer to perceptual science when fixing their ontological commitments regarding the objects of perception? Or in other words, can perceptual science inform us about the nature of perception? Many contemporary mainstream philosophers of perception answer affirmatively. However, in this essay I provide two arguments against this idea. On the one hand, I will argue that perceptual science is not committed to certain assumptions, relevant for determining perceptual ontology, which however are generally relied upon by philosophers when interpreting such science. On the other hand, I will show how perceptual science often relies on another assumption, which I call the ‘Measuring instrument conception’ of sensory systems, which philosophers of perception should clearly reject. Given these two symmetric lines of argument, I will finally suggest that we ought to think differently about the relationship between perceptual science and the philosophy of perception.

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