Physicalism, functionalism, and lots of Quine
Machine god metaphors eat your brain
There are other ways of thinking about AI
My Thoughts on AI, Part 1: Fears, Opinions, and Mental Journey
My own personal thoughts and opinions on AI effects and usage, and how those have evolved over time
My Thoughts on AI | Jack Conte
Hey creators! I’ve been thinking a lot about AI over the last year, but I’ve mostly been speaking about it in little short form clips and in
AI is not superhuman
What metaphor should drive the field of AI research?
On thinking machines
While Chiron Codex is about the application of LLMs and AI-augmented tools, we also need to understand their meaning to us, each other, and society. I have three topics: intelligence,...
On working machines
In part one, on thinking machines, I explored two facets of the philosophy of artificial intelligence: “intelligence”, and consciousness. That left an important topic to consider for this post: the...
Ali Alkhatib: Defining AI
The main issue I have with a lot of work that tries to define AI is that the criteria they use to draw boundaries often turn out to be functionally useless for my needs; these definitions lead us to weird places, letting scholars fixate on strange, unworkable frameworks. Those pedantic fixations don’t really benefit the organizers, activists, regular people who are getting crushed by the systems they’re trying to work against. So I’m going to try to unpack how I think about AI; how I trace the boundaries of the term in a way that’s as useful as possible for me and my needs; and how I would encourage you to scope or define ideas that are important to your work.
How should social science think about AI?
Big structures and large processes are back, baby
We Need to Talk About How We Talk About 'AI'
We share a responsibility to create and use empowering metaphors rather than misleading language, write Emily M. Bender and Nanna Inie.
AI FOR EPISTEMICS & COORDINATION
Civilization and technology have radically improved the human condition. Nonetheless, the world sometimes goes in directions which essentially nobody would prefer — e.g., nuclear arms races, unexpected financial crashes, predatory marketing, or ubiquitous political misinformation.
Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
Reflections on autonomy and the value of thinking for ourselves
How To Think About AI (with Cory Doctorow)
AI might just be useful once we get through the huckster phase.
Unplugging a Seemingly Sentient Machine Is the Rational Choice -- A Metaphysical Perspective
Imagine an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that perfectly mimics human emotion and begs for its continued existence. Is it morally permissible to unplug it? What if limited resources force a choice between unplugging such a pleading AI or a silent pre-term infant? We term this the unplugging paradox. This paper critically examines the deeply ingrained physicalist assumptions-specifically computational functionalism-that keep this dilemma afloat. We introduce Biological Idealism, a framework that-unlike physicalism-remains logically coherent and empirically consistent. In this view, conscious experiences are fundamental and autopoietic life its necessary physical signature. This yields a definitive conclusion: AI is at best a functional mimic, not a conscious experiencing subject. We discuss how current AI consciousness theories erode moral standing criteria, and urge a shift from speculative machine rights to protecting human conscious life. The real moral issue lies not in making AI conscious and afraid of death, but in avoiding transforming humans into zombies.
AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans | Melanie Mitchell | Substack
I write about interesting new developments in AI. Click to read AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans, by Melanie Mitchell, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
