Robert Sparrow
Biographic Data
| ID | 209192 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Sparrow |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Sparrow |
| SIGNATURE | SPARROW R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6093-9456 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 76 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 287 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 76 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
AI and Promethean shame
Cut the bullshit
The rapid development of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies has led to widespread endorsement of GenAI systems serving as a ‘personal tutor’ and learning ‘collaborator’ in higher education. However, because GenAI outputs are prone to ‘hallucinations,’ it has been suggested that students take responsibility for the accuracy of GenAI contributions to their learning. We rehabilitate Plato’s scepticism regarding writing and draw on Harry Frankfurt’s …
Shaping Future Children, Sex Selection, and “Normal” Human Capacities
If we think that parents have an obligation to have a healthy child then we need to know what counts as healthy, when male and female children are born with very different capacities. If we give up on the idea that our obligations to use technologies of genetic selection are discharged once we try to secure the birth of a healthy child, as advocates of human enhancement insist that we should, it seems that parents will be either be obligated to c…
On not being a robot
As Robert Brandom has argued, in order to possess and exercise rational agency – to make judgments and to assess the judgments of others – one must be recognised as a rational agent by other rational agents who, in turn, one recognises as competent to assess one’s rational agency. Moreover, the process of assessing the judgments of other agents is one in which participants must accept moral responsibility for – must ‘stand behind’ – their claims.…
Bullshit universities
The advent of ChatGPT, and the subsequent rapid improvement in the performance of what has become known as Generative AI, has led to many pundits declaring that AI will revolutionize education, as well as work, in the future. In this paper, we argue that enthusiasm for the use of AI in tertiary education is misplaced. A proper understanding of the nature of the outputs of AI suggests that it would be profoundly misguided to replace human teachers…
(Re)animating the ancestors
Veneration of paternal ancestors plays an important role in Chinese tradition. In this article, we offer some speculations about how a new ‘thanatechnology’ – digital personality emulation – may impact on ancestor worship. We explore the ethical issues raised by the use of personality emulations for this purpose, drawing on Confucian, Daoist and contemporary Anglo-American perspectives. For Confucians, the key questions concern the extent to whic…
Miracle Seeds
To fully benefit from new agricultural technologies such as improved seed varieties, significant investment in complementary inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides and practices such as systematic planting, irrigation, and weeding are also required. Farmers may fail to recognize the importance of these complements, leading to disappointing crop yields and outputs and, eventually, dis-adoption of the improved variety. Using a field experiment, …
The Virtues of Interpretable Medical AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have demonstrated impressive performance across a variety of clinical tasks. However, notoriously, sometimes these systems are “black boxes.” The initial response in the literature was a demand for “explainable AI.” However, recently, several authors have suggested that making AI more explainable or “interpretable” is likely to be at the cost of the accuracy of these systems and that prioritizing interpretabil…
Friendly AI will still be our master. Or, why we should not want to be the pets of super-intelligent computers
When asked about humanity’s future relationship with computers, Marvin Minsky famously replied “If we’re lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets”. A number of eminent authorities continue to argue that there is a real danger that “super-intelligent” machines will enslave—perhaps even destroy—humanity. One might think that it would swiftly follow that we should abandon the pursuit of AI. Instead, most of those who purport to be concerned about…
Digital Humans to Combat Loneliness and Social Isolation
Social isolation and loneliness are growing concerns around the globe that put people at increased risk of disease and early death. One much‐touted approach to addressing them is deploying artificially intelligent agents to serve as companions for socially isolated and lonely people. Focusing on digital humans, we consider evidence and ethical arguments for and against this approach. We set forth and defend public health policies that respond to …
Exploring the impact of tenure arrangements and incentives on sustainable forest use
The types of tenurial arrangements and incentives appropriate for the sustainable management of common pool resources (CPRs), such as forests, remain a topic of debate. In this study, we aim to (i) investigate the extraction level of forest resources under short and long-term property rights, and (ii) evaluate the effectiveness of introducing mechanisms that leverage reputation and feelings of guilt in promoting cooperation among CPR users with s…
Lights out” poultry production and pandemic influenza
Poultry production makes a substantial contribution to global food security, providing energy, protein, and essential micro-nutrients to humans. Modern intensive poultry farming systems are challenged by the evolution of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza strains. The presence of avian influenza in poultry flocks poses a significant risk of an avian origin influenza that is easily transmittable between human beings evolving. By reducing contact be…
Artificial Intelligence and U.S. Military Cadets’ Attitudes About Future War
What shapes warfighters’ trust in military technologies augmented with Artificial Intelligence (AI)? Research often assumes that junior military personnel, including cadets training to become officers, will trust AI during future wars, and at higher levels than senior officers. We test these claims by fielding a survey experiment among a representative sample of cadets assigned to the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program in the United …
On the functioning of community-based health insurance schemes in rural Ethiopia
Should we embrace “Big Sister”? Smart speakers as a means to combat intimate partner violence
It is estimated that one in three women experience intimate partner violence (IPV) across the course of their life. The popular uptake of “smart speakers” powered by sophisticated AI means that surveillance of the domestic environment is increasingly possible. Correspondingly, there are various proposals to use smart speakers to detect or report IPV. In this paper, we clarify what might be possible when it comes to combatting IPV using existing o…
Technology ethics assessment
That technologies may raise ethical issues is now widely recognised. The ‘responsible innovation’ literature – as well as, to a lesser extent, the applied ethics and bioethics literature – has responded to the need for ethical reflection on technologies by developing a number of tools and approaches to facilitate such reflection. Some of these instruments consist of lists of questions that people are encouraged to ask about technologies – a metho…
Do Robots Have Sex? A Prolegomenon
Research in Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) suggests that people attribute gender to (some) robots. In this paper we outline a program of research on the gendering of robots and on the ethical issues raised by such gendering. Understanding which robots are gendered, when, and why, will require careful research in HRI, drawing on anthropology and social psychology, informed by state-of-the-art research in gender studies and critical theory. Design f…
Behavioural and environmental risk factors associated with primary schoolchildren’s overweight and obesity in urban Indonesia
Objectives: To aid the design of nutrition interventions in low- and middle-income countries undergoing a nutrition transition, this study examined behavioural and environmental risk factors associated with childhood overweight and obesity in urban Indonesia. Design: Body height and weight of children were measured to determine BMI-for-age Z-scores and childhood overweight and obesity status. A self-administered parental survey measured socio-eco…
Effects of performance-based capitation payment on the use of public primary health care services in Indonesia
The Virtues of Interpretable Medical Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have demonstrated impressive performance across a variety of clinical tasks. However, notoriously, sometimes these systems are “black boxes.” The initial response in the literature was a demand for “explainable AI.” However, recently, several authors have suggested that making AI more explainable or “interpretable” is likely to be at the cost of the accuracy of these systems and that prioritizing interpretabil…
Masturbation, Deception, and Rape
‘ Rape by deception’ occurs when the victim ‘consents’ to sexual penetration as a result of certain sorts of deception by the perpetrator. The legal and philosophical literature on rape by deception has almost exclusively concentrated on cases wherein victims are brought to ‘consent’ to sexual intercourse by deception. Broadening our focus to consider sexual penetration in other contexts reveals a puzzle: if penetration in the context of sexual i…
Genome editing
Sex robot fantasies
Nancy Jecker is right when she says that older persons ought not be ashamed if they wish to remain sexually active in advanced old age.She offers a useful account of the role that sexuality plays in supporting key human capabilities.However, Jecker assumes an exaggerated account of what sex robots are likely to be able to offer for the foreseeable future when she suggests that we are obligated to make them available to older persons with disabili…
Gendering the seed
In order to avoid the implication that ‘mitochondrial replacement techniques’ (MRT) would produce ‘three parent babies’, discourses around these techniques typically dismiss the contribution of the mitochondria to genetic parenthood and personal identity. According to many participants in debates about MRT, ‘real parenthood’ is a matter of contributing nuclear DNA, which in turn implies that men and women make the same contribution to the embryo.…
Virtue and Vice in Our Relationships with Robots
Remittances, Liquidity Constraints and Human Capital Investments in Ecuador
The March of the robot dogs
Defending Deaf Culture
C OCHLEAR implants" are a technology which attempts to "cure" deafness by bypassing the outer ear through electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve.In the last two decades, these implants have been offered as treatment options not only for adults who have lost their hearing as a result of accident or disease in later life, but also for children who were deafened as infants or who were born deaf.An increasing number of operations are being unde…
Robots and Respect
There is increasing speculation within military and policy circles that the future of armed conflict is likely to include extensive deployment of robots designed to identify targets and destroy them without the direct oversight of a human operator. My aim in this paper is twofold. First, I will argue that the ethical case for allowing autonomous targeting, at least in specific restricted domains, is stronger than critics have typically acknowledg…
Social health insurance for the poor
A first step towards meeting Indonesia's ambition for universal health insurance was made in 2005 with the introduction of the Askeskin programme, a subsidized social health insurance targeted to the informal sector and the poor. This paper investigates targeting and impact of the Askeskin programme using panel data for 8582 households observed in 2005 and 2006, and applying difference-in-differences estimation in combination with propensity scor…
Poverty, labor markets and trade liberalization in Indonesia
Non-agricultural earnings in peri-urban areas of Tanzania
The impact of Ethiopia's pilot community based health insurance scheme on healthcare utilization and cost of care
Uptake of health insurance and the productive safety net program in rural Ethiopia
Implants and ethnocide
This paper uses the fictional case of the ‘Babel fish’ to explore and illustrate the issues involved in the controversy about the use of cochlear implants in prelinguistically deaf children. Analysis of this controversy suggests that the development of genetic tests for deafness poses a serious threat to the continued flourishing of Deaf culture. I argue that the relationships between Deaf and hearing cultures that are revealed and constructed in…
Social engagement and the elderly in rural Indonesia
Enrollment in Ethiopia’s Community-Based Health Insurance Scheme
Indonesia Under the New Normal
As the Covid-19 crisis deepened in 2020, President Joko Widodo announced that Indonesia should prepare for the ‘new normal’. But when social distancing restrictions were relaxed in June to encourage economic recovery, the virus was not yet contained in Indonesia. Since then, the rate of infection has been rising faster than in many neighbouring countries. The pandemic has hit the economy hard, with a 5.3% reduction in GDP in the second quarter, t…
Does Electrification Spur the Fertility Transition? Evidence From Indonesia
We analyze various pathways through which access to electricity affects fertility in Indonesia, using a district difference-in-difference approach. The electrification rate increased by 65 % over the study period, and our results suggest that the subsequent effects on fertility account for about 18 % to 24 % of the overall decline in fertility. A key channel is increased exposure to television. Using in addition several waves of Demographic and H…
The competition of ideas
The 'marketplace of ideas' is an influential metaphor with widespread currency in debates about freedom of speech. We explore a number of ways competition between ideas might be described as occurring in a marketplace and find that none supports the use of the metaphor. We suggest that an alternative metaphor, that of the 'garden of ideas', may offer more productive insights into issues surrounding the regulation of speech
Dropping out of Ethiopia’s community-based health insurance scheme
Low contract renewal rates have been identified as one of the challenges facing the development of community-based health insurance (CBHI) schemes. This article uses longitudinal household survey data gathered in 2012 and 2013 to examine dropout in the case of Ethiopia's pilot CBHI scheme. We treat dropout as a function of scheme affordability, health status, scheme understanding and quality of care. The scheme saw enrolment increase from 41% 1 y…
Targeting the poor in times of crisis
This paper looks at targeting performance of the Indonesian health card programme that was implemented in August 1998 to protect access to health care for the poor during the Indonesian economic crisis. By February 1999, 22 million people had received a health card. The health card provided a user fee waiver for public health care. Targeting of the health card was pro-poor, but with considerable leakage to the non-poor. Utilization of the health …
The Ethics of Terraforming
Sickness and Death
Revolutionary and Familiar, Inevitable and Precarious
Make way for the wealthy? Autonomous vehicles, markets in mobility, and social justice
The development of a ‘mobility as a service’ model for accessing urban transport via autonomous vehicles may be expected to have far-reaching implications for the economics of road transport. In particular, it would offer a new opportunity to price access to the roads in accordance with the principles of the free market. Once people are paying for mobility on the roads on a ‘per trip’ basis, it will be possible to offer different levels of access…
Robotics Has a Race Problem
If people are inclined to attribute race to humanoid robots, as recent research suggests, then designers of social robots confront a difficult choice. Most existing social robots have white surfaces and are therefore, I suggest, likely to be perceived as White, exposing their designers to accusations of racism. However, manufacturing robots that would be perceived as Black, Brown, or Asian risks representing people of these races as slaves, espec…
If People Were Movies? Free Speech and Free Association
The modern world is characterized by vast movements of money and people across national borders.It is a noteworthy feature of debates around borders and sovereignty since the 1980s that the movement of labor has generally proved much more controversial than the movement of capital.An important early 1990s collection on the ethics of transnational flows of money and people focused on the normative significance, if any, of this distinction in treat…
The case for regulating intragenic GMOs
Talking sense about political correctness
In this paper I make a number of points about “political correctness”. Although individually these arguments seem straightforward - and will hopefully be uncontroversial - put together in context they reveal the idea of a “politically correct”, left-wing dominated, media or intelligentsia in Western political culture to be a conservative bogeyman. The rhetoric of “political correctness” is in fact overwhelmingly a right-wing conservative one whic…
The Ethics of Terraforming
Poverty, Education, and Health in Indonesia
The authors investigate the extent to which Indonesia's poor benefit from public and private provisioning of education and health services. Drawing on multiple rounds of SUSENAS household surveys, they document a reversal in the rate of decline in poverty and a slowdown in social sector improvements resulting from the economic crisis in the second half of the 1990s. Carrying out traditional static benefit-incidence analysis of public spending in …
The competition of ideas
The 'marketplace of ideas' is an influential metaphor with widespread currency in debates about freedom of speech. We explore a number of ways competition between ideas might be described as occurring in a marketplace and find that none supports the use of the metaphor. We suggest that an alternative metaphor, that of the 'garden of ideas', may offer more productive insights into issues surrounding the regulation of speech
Non-agricultural earnings in peri-urban areas of Tanzania
Talking sense about political correctness
In this paper I make a number of points about “political correctness”. Although individually these arguments seem straightforward - and will hopefully be uncontroversial - put together in context they reveal the idea of a “politically correct”, left-wing dominated, media or intelligentsia in Western political culture to be a conservative bogeyman. The rhetoric of “political correctness” is in fact overwhelmingly a right-wing conservative one whic…
The March of the robot dogs
Defending Deaf Culture
C OCHLEAR implants" are a technology which attempts to "cure" deafness by bypassing the outer ear through electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve.In the last two decades, these implants have been offered as treatment options not only for adults who have lost their hearing as a result of accident or disease in later life, but also for children who were deafened as infants or who were born deaf.An increasing number of operations are being unde…
In the hands of machines? The future of aged care
Killer Robots
The United States Army's Future Combat Systems Project, which aims to manufacture a ‘robot army’ to be ready for deployment by 2012, is only the latest and most dramatic example of military interest in the use of artificially intelligent systems in modern warfare. This paper considers the ethics of the decision to send artificially intelligent robots into war, by asking who we should hold responsible when an autonomous weapon system is involved i…
Revolutionary and Familiar, Inevitable and Precarious
The case for regulating intragenic GMOs
Talkin' 'bout a (nanotechnological) revolution
It is often claimed that the development of nanotechnology will constitute a "technological revolution" with profound social, economic, and political consequences. The author surveys arguments that might be used to block this analogy and argue that none of them justify drawing a sharp distinction between social change due to technology and change due to other political causes. Two things follow from this discussion: First, we need to reconsider t…
Targeting the poor in times of crisis
This paper looks at targeting performance of the Indonesian health card programme that was implemented in August 1998 to protect access to health care for the poor during the Indonesian economic crisis. By February 1999, 22 million people had received a health card. The health card provided a user fee waiver for public health care. Targeting of the health card was pro-poor, but with considerable leakage to the non-poor. Utilization of the health …
Predators or plowshares? arms control of robotic weapons
With the development of the General Atomics MQ-1 Predator, robotic weapons came of age. The operations of this unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northern Africa in the last few years have given us a glimpse of the future of high-tech war. It is a future in which thousands of miles separate those firing weapons from those whom they kill, in which joystick jockeys have replaced pilots and soldiers, and in which the p…
Xenotransplantation, Consent and International Justice
The risk posed to the community by possible xenozoonosis after xenotransplantation suggests that some form of ‘community consent’ is required before whole organ animal‐to‐human xenotransplantation should take place. I argue that this requirement places greater obstacles in the path of ethical xenotransplantation than has previously been recognised. The relevant community is global and there are no existing institutions with democratic credentials…
Remittances, Liquidity Constraints and Human Capital Investments in Ecuador
Implants and ethnocide
This paper uses the fictional case of the ‘Babel fish’ to explore and illustrate the issues involved in the controversy about the use of cochlear implants in prelinguistically deaf children. Analysis of this controversy suggests that the development of genetic tests for deafness poses a serious threat to the continued flourishing of Deaf culture. I argue that the relationships between Deaf and hearing cultures that are revealed and constructed in…
A Not‐So‐New Eugenics
John Harris and Julian Savulescu, leading figures in the "new' eugenics, argue that parents are morally obligated to use genetic and other technologies to enhance their children. But the argument they give leads to conclusions even more radical than they acknowledge. Ultimately, the world it would lead to is not all that different from that championed by eugenicists one hundred years ago
Unemployment Assistance and Transition to Employment in Argentina
In 2001–2, Argentina experienced a wrenching economic crisis. Plan Jefes, implemented in May 2002, was Argentina’s institutional response to the increase in unemployment and poverty triggered by the crisis. The program provided a safety net and appears to have protected some families against indigence. Despite this success, the continued existence of the program, which provides benefits to eligible unemployed individuals for an unlimited duration…
"Just Say No" to Drones
It is difficult to find a figure for the exact percentage of robotics research that is currently funded by the military. However, it is clear that military organizations and budgets fund a significant amount of and perhaps even most robotics research today. Recent technological progress, which has greatly increased the number of roles that it is plausible for robots to undertake; the potential for robots to help keep soldiers out of harm's way, a…
Queerin’ the PGD Clinic
Poverty and Social Protection in Indonesia
Joan Hardjono, Nuning Akhmadi and Sudarno Sumarto (eds) (2010) Poverty and Social Protection in Indonesia, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, and SMERU Research Institute, Jakarta, pp
Social health insurance for the poor
A first step towards meeting Indonesia's ambition for universal health insurance was made in 2005 with the introduction of the Askeskin programme, a subsidized social health insurance targeted to the informal sector and the poor. This paper investigates targeting and impact of the Askeskin programme using panel data for 8582 households observed in 2005 and 2006, and applying difference-in-differences estimation in combination with propensity scor…
Coping with shocks in rural Ethiopia
Using survey data and event history interviews undertaken in Ethiopia, we investigate which shocks trigger which coping responses and why. Relatively covariate natural and economic shocks trigger reductions in savings and in food consumption, while relatively idiosyncratic health shocks prompt reductions in savings and a reliance on borrowing. Surprisingly, across all shocks, households do not rely on gifts from family and friends, highlighting t…
Playing for Fun, Training for War
In the cultural controversy surrounding “violent video games,” the manufacturers and players of games often insist that computer games are a form of harmless entertainment that is unlikely to influence the real-world activities of players. Yet games and military simulations are used by military organizations across the world to teach the modern arts of war, from how to shoot a gun to teamwork, leadership skills, military values, and cultural sens…
Political science (38 works) · Sociology (33 works) · Economics (32 works) · Computer Science (31 works) · Law (27 works) · Psychology (27 works) · Medicine (25 works) · Business (22 works) · Economic growth (21 works) · Engineering (17 works)