Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence 2021

Barry Smith

Readings

“Making AI Meaningful Again” [1]

“There is no General AI” [2]

Schedule

Monday February 22 2021 14:30 - 17:15: The Impossibility of Digital Immortality

The Turing Test and the problem of natural language production

Why machines will have no consciousness and no will

Why you cannot exist outside your body

Readings:

Martine Rothblatt: Mind is Deeper Than Matter TO BE SUPPLIED AT USI SITE

John Searle: Minds, Brains, and Programs

Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith: There is no Artificial General Intelligence

Tuesday February 23 2021 14:30 - 17:15: Natural and Artificial Intelligence

What do intelligence tests measure?

Functions of the human brain

Problems with the Hutter definition of intelligence

Readings:

Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter: Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence

Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith: Making AI Meaningful Again

Wednesday February 24 2021 09:30 - 12:15: Why Not Robot Police?

On why AI ethics is (a) impossible, (b) unnecessary (with Jobst Landgrebe)

Readings:

Moor: Four kinds of ethical robots

Jobst Landgrebe and Barry Smith: No AI Ethics TO BE SUPPLIED AT USI SITE

Wednesday May 12 2021 14:30 - 17.15

Searle's Chinese Room argument

Intelligence vs. consciousness

What is intelligence and what do intelligence tests measure?

Driverless philosophy: How data science can help

the history of philosophy

to make progress in philosophy

Readings:

There is no general AI

Humanness

Slides

Friday May 14 2021 09:30 - 12:15

The cycles of AI enthusiasm and AI winters

Making AI Meaningful Again

Basic Formal Ontology (ISO/IEC 21838-2)

Upper Level Ontologies

DOLCE

Slides

Friday-Saturday May 21-22: SNF Conference on Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence

Course Description

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the subfield of Computer Science devoted to developing programs that enable computers to display behavior that can (broadly) be characterised as intelligent. On the strong version, the ultimate goal of AI is to create an artificial system that is as intelligent as a human being. Recent striking successes such as AlphaGo have convinced many not only that this objective is obtainable but also that in a not too distant future machines will become even more intelligent than human beings.

The actual and possible developments in AI open up a series of striking questions such as:

• Can a computer have a conscious mind?
• Can it have desires and emotions?
• Would machine intelligence, if there is such a thing, be something comparable to human intelligence or something quite different?

In addition, these developments make it possible for us to consider a series of philosophical questions in a new light, including:

• What is personal identity? Could a machine have something like a personal identity? Would I really survive if the contents of my brain were uploaded to the cloud?
• What is it for a human to behave in an ethical manner? (Could there be something like machine ethics? Could machines used in fighting wars be programmed to behave ethically?)
• What is a meaningful life? If routine, meaningless work in the future is performed entirely by machines, will this make possible new sorts of meaningful lives on the part of humans?

After introducing the relevant ideas and tools from both AI and philosophy, all the aforementioned questions will be thoroughly addressed in class discussions following lectures by Drs Facchini and Smith and presentations of relevant papers by the students.