AI as an Epistemic Technology

In this paper I argue that Artificial intelligence and methods associated with it, such as machine learning, are first and foremost epistemic technologies—technologies which are exclusively and intrinsically designed to enhance our capacities as knowers. If this is so, then our relationship towards them cannot be immediately drawn from our analysis of our relationship to just any other technologies and non-trivial philosophical efforts will be in need to truly grasp the nature of such relationship. As we will see, understanding AI as an epistemic technology will also have significant implications for important debates in the epistemology and ethics of artificial intelligence. Particularly those debates pertaining to explainability, opacity and even epistemic harms related to data science methods