Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

Below is my "Question of the Month" response which was published in Philosophy Now , Dec 2015/Jan 2016 ( see subscriber link) (I was awarded a random book for my response.) What’s More Important: Freedom, Justice, Happiness, Truth? The thought foremost in the minds of the Jews fleeing the Third Reich would have been freedom from Nazi clutches, not justice. For them justice must have seemed a distant mirage. What makes justice hard to get is that, as philosopher John Gray points out, it is “an artefact of custom.” So when customs change, justice changes. And happiness here? The term can be applied in the context of someone fleeing oppression only if we stretch the meaning of ‘happiness’ to cover emotions such as relief, comfort, or solace. It is doubtful though if Hitler’s victims would have experienced even pale happiness. ABA's Magna Carta Memorial, Runnymede, UK. (Photo: Andrew Bowden/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0) Some say that truth consists of beliefs ...

The machines in this case exhibit not only vast intelligence but also considerable wisdom that far exceeds the purpose for which they were built and the algorithms that defined them. They have apparently acquired such wisdom by somehow transitioning from syntactics to semantics, gaining an ability to possess content and meaning. The leadys are not just a brain in a vat anymore; they are persons (or even better?) Will machines take over the world one day? This question has been in the news recently with leading thinkers like Professor Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk of Tesla expressing the worry that uncontrolled evolution of machine intelligence may one day presage the end of humanity. [i] This fear of rampant technology ruling the world is however is not of recent vintage, especially among the literati. Writers ranging from HG Wells and Aldous Huxley to more recent ones like Arthur C Clarke and scientist and writer Baroness Susan Greenfield have produced some well-known an...

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at the Aeon Ideas Beta website - Aeon Ideas https://ideas.aeon.co/questions/should-we-be-worried-about-the-advancement-of-artificial-intelligence#viewpoint_2919 When we lack a precise definition of “intelligence”, we run the risk of jumbling run-of-the-mill machines with limited intelligence into a super-intelligent demon and fear that our microwave will one day take over our world. I n the “Art of War” Lao-Tzu stressed the importance of knowing thy enemy before going into battle. This includes getting a grip on your enemy’s strengths and weaknesses and the myths and misconceptions that surround him. To explain if we should fear developments in Artificial Intelligence we therefore need to firstly understand at least a bit of AI, cutting through the jargon in not only the techie journals and online fora but even mainstream media. It involves also distinguishing between (a) what AI-related developments – especially those ...