by Colin Allen
Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science
Program in Cognitive Science
Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior
College of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington
The prospect of machines capable of following moral principles, let alone understanding them, seems as remote today as the word “robot” is old. Some technologists enthusiastically extrapolate from the observation that computing power doubles every 18 months to predict an imminent “technological singularity” in which a threshold for machines of superhuman intelligence will be suddenly surpassed. Many Singularitarians assume a lot, not the least of which is that intelligence is fundamentally a computational process. The techno-optimists among them also believe that such machines will be essentially friendly to human beings. I am skeptical about the Singularity, and even if “artificial intelligence” is not an oxymoron, “friendly A.I.” will require considerable scientific progress on a number of fronts.
Abstracted from ‘Qualitative experience in machines,’ The Digital Phoenix: How computers are changing philosophy.
1. Many people, perhaps most people, have the idea that, however problematic qualitative experience is for the case of human beings, it is a lot more so for that of machines constructed by human beings. Few philosophers doubt that human beings’
Most researchers agree that there is no reason in principle why we will not eventually develop conscious machines that rival or surpass human intelligence. If we are crossing to a new era of the posthuman, how have we gotten here? And how should we understand the process?
Cultural theorists have addressed the topic of the
Our Forum is for scholars in the humanities and sciences to share their ideas and research. The Forum offers specialists as well as members of the public the opportunity to engage experts on questions concerning the meaning and significance, if any, of human life, especially at its edges. Read more...
Tom Clark: Rosenberg thinks that science and "explanation by interpretation" are incompatible and mutually exclusive, so we must choose between them. Merely physical systems such as ourselves can't really refer to external...
David Duffy: Non-overlapping magisteria of knowledge and pleasure ;)
I have a couple of quibbles:
Biology would not accept the gene as real until it was shown to have a physical structure: is as...
Jason King: This conversation, while ending here, continues on Facebook. Join us there by logging on to your Facebook account and proceeding to our group: On the Human.
Although meat is said to be the most highly prized category of food in the majority of human cultures, it is also, according to a recent ethnographic survey, “vastly more likely to be the target of food taboos,” than any other type of edible substance.[1] People throughout the world display strong aversions to killing and consuming particular anima...
Recent Comments