Artificial Intelligence: a philosophical discussion
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Needless to say, AI has been in the news – whether it’s the energy and water consumption of data centers and the cost to communities and the environment, AI-enabled mischief, or threats to human civilization as we know it, concern seems to be everywhere suddenly. Philosophers have been worrying over aspects of artificial general intelligence and robotics for decades. Some questions and topics I have written about in the past include:
- “Intelligence,” what is it precisely? How does the artificial sort differ from the natural sort? Defining our terms is important to understanding what we say using them.
- Can we conceive of “artificial” suffering (which implies artificial consciousness) as though nature did not already supply enough? (If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, is it a duck? Could it experience the pain of a duck?)
- The morality involved in how we interact with intelligent agents runs both ways: philosophers have asked not only what will govern what AI agents may do to us, but what we may do to them?
- Will we one day have to grant legal status, rights, and protections to robots as we currently do human groups? (Yes, laws have been proposed along these lines.)
- What can self-driving cars teach us about human values? (It turns out a lot.)
- What goes on psychologically when humans and AI agents interact? (As in AI-facilitated therapy or religious counseling, or AI companionship or sex…)
- The singular characteristic of AI is speed. There is no doubt that AI already has enabled advancement in science, mathematics, education, medicine, economics, art, music, practically every field of human endeavor, and there are no obvious limits to what it will enable in the future. Why worry? What exactly is the nature of our worry? We need to spell that out.
- What started out (as with most human technologies) as a tool, may one day supersede us entirely. It is our natural intelligence (NI) that permitted our dominion over this planet. If something surpasses our intelligence, will we still be relevant? Or will we be relegated to specimens, perhaps kept in zoos, preserved for research or as curiosities, or kept as pets because of our charm? Or will we be seen as pests ultimately, and eliminated the way we do cockroaches or mosquitoes?
- On the positive side, it’s been suggested that if AI could be instilled with “humane” values, humanity may flourish under AI governance. Human governance has been trying to civilize the species for millennia and the result is an unending trail of tears. Might super intelligence tempered with the right sort of values not do better at governing us than we have any record of doing?
These and many related questions have kept philosophers up at night. Come and share in the insomnia if you dare…
Papers on philosophical aspects of AI: https://archive.org/details/@biancoluno/lists/9/ai
– Victor Muñoz
Guanajuato / Seattle
