AI Ethics, Coeckelbergh
Last updated on 14 Jul 2022.Review and notes on AI Ethics, by Mark Coeckelbergh.
1. Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall
- How pervasive is the impact of AI?
- AI ethics concerns the impact of AI technologies on society and the economy.
2. Superintelligence, Monsters, and the AI Apocalypse
- Superintelligence - machines that surpass human intelligence.
- Recursive self-improvement
- Whole brain emulation
- Most narrations of superintelligence are premised on some sort of technological existentialism.
- Transhumanism - we need to enhance the human being (deus ex human, so to speak) to compete/keep up with AI
- Most researchers interpret ideas in spiritual, religious ways - even if they attempt to reject it.
- Frankenstein’s new monster - the transfiguration of the creation.
- The control problem - what happens when science eludes our control?
- Romanticism attempts to liberate us from the darker sides of modernity
- The creation competes with the creator, like a child who devours the patient.
- Frankenstein complex - a deep-seeded fear of the child, of a child which we cannot help creating but is so profoundly different from us we fear it will murder us.
- Transcendence - God is ontologically and epistemilogically above the mateial world.
- The transhumanist quest for immortality begins very erly in human history.
3. All About the Human
- One perspective suggests that experiential knowledge, from the phenomenological being-in-the-world, cannot be formalized.
- Continential tradition emphasises human exceptionalism.
- Analytic tradition emphasizes that the human mind really is a machine of sorts.
- Even if in theory superintelligence is possible, this does not mean it is likely to emerge soon.
- Enlightenment thinking - optimism on the potential of science to shape human ability and experience.
- Romanticist thinking - casts science as a pervasive anti-good
- Humanists vs the transhumanists - who/what is human? What is the materiality/transcendental quality of the human?
- Donna Haraway and the cybernetic transhumanist project.
- What is the narrative of progress?
- Standing upon posthumanism, AI can liberate itself from human intelligence towards nonhuman modes of intelligence and creativity.
- AI has a strong materiality to it.
4. Just Machines?
- Should AI be given rights? Responsibilities?
- Moral agency - can it make decisions and be held responsible? Patiency - does it have protected rights? Is it entitled to certain qualities?
- Is AI autonomous? Is it intelligent?
- Do machines have the capacity for mental states, emotions, or free will?
- Can we give AI principles to follow?
- We have to give AI partial morality but not complete morality.
- Trolley dilemmas - a caricature of ethics.
- Is it morally acceptable to kill AI? Can we torture AI? Is it moral to dismember its mind?
- Humans need to know little of AI to empathize with it - the Lacanian fantasy.
- Can robots be others? Or are they relegated to the Big Other?