Category: Man / Machine
-
The following are notes ahead of a panel discussion this afternoon, where we will discuss the need for a legal structure for digital persons in the wake of the general discussion of artificial intelligence. The idea of a digital assistant seems to suggest a world in which we will see…
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
-
In his chapter on intelectronics, his word for what most closely resembles artificial intelligence, Stanislaw Lem suggests an insidious way in which the machine could take over. It would not be, he says, because it wants to terrorize us, but more likely because it will try to be helpful. Lem…
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
-
Why do we develop artificial intelligence? Is it merely because of an almost faustian curiosity? Is it because of an innate megalomania that suggests that we could, if we want to, become gods? The debate today is ripe with examples of risks and dangers, but the argument for the development…
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
-
Philosopher Galen Strawson challenges the idea that we have a cohesive, narrative self that lives in a structurally robust setting, and suggests that for many, the self will be episodic at best and that there is no real experience of self at all. The discussion of the self – from…
-
+
+
+
+
+
+
In the remarkable work A Conspiracy against Humanity, horror writer Thomas Ligotti argues that consciousness is a curse that captures mankind in eternal horror. This world, and our consciousness of it, is an unequivocal evil, and the only possible set of responses to this state of affairs is to snuff…
-
Philosopher and writer Simone Weil laid out a few principles on automation in her fascinating and often difficult book Need for Roots. Her view as positive, and she noted that among workers in factories the happiest ones seemed to be the ones that worked with machines. She had strict views…
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
-
Are there social institutions that work better if they are biologically bounded? What would this even mean? Here is what I am thinking about: what if, say, a market is a great way of discovering knowledge, coordinating prices and solving complex problems – but only if it consists solely of…
-
In a comment on Luciano Floridi’s The Ethics of Information Martin Falment Fultot writes (Philosophy and Computers Spring 2016 Vol 15 no 2): “Another difficulty for Floridi’s theory of information as constituting the fundamental value comes from the sheer existence of the unilateral arrow of thermodynamic processes. The second law…
-
There is another perspective here that we may want to discuss, and that is if the dichotomy we are examining is maybe a false, or at least, less interesting one. What if we find that both man and machine can belong to a broader class of things that we may…
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
-
+
+
+
+
+
+
How does man relate to machine? There is a series of questions here that I find fascinating and not a little difficult. I think the relationship between these two concepts also are determinative for a large set of issues that we are debating today, and so we would do well…
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+