Thomas M. Powers on how a computer might process Kant’s moral imperative. Philosophers have worried about how to compare humans and machines ever since Alan Turing proposed his famous ‘intelligence test’ in his 1950 Mind article ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. If the successful imitation of a human conversation is one sufficient condition for intelligence, as […]
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James H. Moor defines different ways in which machines could be moral. Could we ever teach robots right from wrong? Can we afford not to try? I wish to defend the idea that robot ethics is a legitimate, interesting, and important field of philosophical and scientific research. I believe it’s possible that someday robots will
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Veṅkaṭanātha (also known as Vedānta Deśika “teacher of Vedānta”) was an Indian polymath who wrote philosophical as well as religious and poetical works in several languages, including Sanskrit, Maṇipravāḷa—a Sanskritised form of literary Tamil—and Tamil. He is traditionally dated to 1269-1370, but as explained by Neevel “the lifespans of the earliest teachers of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta
Veṅkaṭanātha (Vedānta Deśika) (c. 1269—c. 1370) Read More »
Tyler Burge is an American philosopher who has done influential work in several areas of philosophy. These include philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of science (primarily philosophy of psychology), and history of philosophy (focusing especially on Frege, but also on the classical rationalists—Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant). Burge has also done some
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Jesse Tomalty considers what human rights are and how they’re justified. A few months ago there was a spate of headlines announcing that the UN had made internet access a human right. It turns out that this claim was rather misleading. What the UN did was pass a resolution emphasizing the importance of internet access
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Mary Midgley argues that Security is not about the size of your military. The Shock of Khaki During a series of colonial wars in the nineteenth century, the British army gradually changed the colour of its soldiers’ uniforms from the traditional scarlet to khaki. Its reasons for doing this are perhaps fairly obvious, but the
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Eric Dietrich looks forward to the extinction of humanity. Recently on the History Channel, artificial intelligence (AI) was singled out, with much wringing of hands, as one of the seven possible causes of the end of human life. I will argue that this wringing of hands is quite inappropriate: the best thing that could happen
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Russell Powell says it’s not easy using genes to enhance humanity, even in theory. On display in the National Portrait Gallery of London is a ‘DNA portrait’ of geneticist Sir John Sulston. The work is billed by the artist as “the most realistic portrait in the gallery” because it “carries the actual instructions that led
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Michael Selgelid offers a cautionary perspective on genetic enhancement. Revolutionary developments in biomedical science, particularly in genetics, may lead to new cures or preventative therapies for a wide variety of human diseases. Just about everyone agrees that this would be a good thing. However, the very same kinds of developments that may be used to combat
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Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson argue that artificial moral enhancement is now essential if humanity is to avoid catastrophe. For the vast majority of our 150,000 years or so on the planet, we lived in small, close-knit groups, working hard with primitive tools to scratch sufficient food and shelter from the land. Sometimes we competed with other small