Philosophy and technology practice questions.

A bank refuses a loan on the advice of a model whose internal weights no one can survey. Asked why the application failed, an engineer replies that the model is highly accurate. Which philosophical problem does that reply leave untouched?

• Whether the training records were collected under the rules the regulator sets
• Whether a decision can be justified to a person to whom no reason is given
• Whether the model could be made more accurate by training it on further cases
• Whether a human loan officer would have reached the same decision in this case

Answer: Whether a decision can be justified to a person to whom no reason is given

Accuracy is a property of a rule's performance across many cases, while a justification is something owed to the person the rule is applied to, so no improvement in performance answers the demand. The point differs from the is-ought objection: even a practice that ought to be continued still has to be explicable to the person it is applied to.

Parents select an embryo for height and musical aptitude. Which objection to their decision is Kantian in form?

• The procedure carries medical risks to which the child has not agreed
• The child is brought into being as the instrument of a plan formed by others
• Wealthy parents will secure advantages that other families cannot afford
• The traits chosen may turn out not to be the ones the child later comes to value

Answer: The child is brought into being as the instrument of a plan formed by others

The formula of humanity forbids treating a person merely as a means, and the charge is that a child designed to realise a parental project is produced as one. Risk, fairness of access and fit with the child's later preferences are objections of other kinds, and Sandel's appeal to giftedness is different again.

An energy company describes a river solely as a quantity of megawatts available for scheduling. In Heidegger's vocabulary, the river is here disclosed as

• an object of contemplation for those who visit
• a natural system whose value lies in its independence of use
• standing-reserve, a stock of energy held ready to be ordered
• a public good whose ownership should belong to the community

Answer: standing-reserve, a stock of energy held ready to be ordered

Under enframing (Gestell) things are disclosed as standing-reserve, resources on call to be ordered and switched about, and Heidegger says that what stands by in this way no longer stands over against us even as an object. Contemplation, value independent of use and communal ownership are not his terms for this mode of disclosure.

A bridge over a parkway is built so low that buses cannot pass beneath it, so that people without cars cannot reach the beach beyond. Winner uses cases of this kind to argue that

• design choices can settle social arrangements in advance
• engineers ought to be licensed by the state
• a technology always reflects the intentions of its designer
• the political effects of a technology depend only on its users

Answer: design choices can settle social arrangements in advance

The arrangement is built into the artefact rather than added by its users. Reading Winner as claiming that intentions always explain design overstates him, since part of his point is that some technologies require particular political forms whatever anyone intended.

A historian reconstructs a case in which one keyboard layout became standard through decisions taken by manufacturers and typing schools, while a rival layout that its inventor's own trials found faster never displaced it. If the reconstruction is granted, the case tells most directly against

• the claim that artefacts can embody politics
• the claim that engineers are responsible for their designs
• the claim that efficiency counts as a value in design at all
• technological determinism about which designs prevail

Answer: technological determinism about which designs prevail

Determinism predicts that the technically superior design prevails, whereas the case supports the social construction view on which relevant social groups fix the outcome. Whether that rival layout really was faster is disputed among historians, so the argument is run on the reconstruction as stated rather than on a settled fact.

A worker on an automated line contributes one repeated motion to a product they never see completed and had no part in designing. Which analysis of this situation is Marx's?

• The worker's preferences about the job have simply been mistaken
• The arrangement is unjust because the wage is below the market rate
• The worker is estranged from the product and from their own activity
• The case shows that machinery as such is opposed to human life

Answer: The worker is estranged from the product and from their own activity

Alienation for Marx is a set of relations between the worker, the product, the process and other people, not a report of felt dissatisfaction. His complaint is directed at how production is organised rather than at machinery itself.