When academic philosophy’s rock stars like David Chalmers start advising their grad students toward careers with tech corporations, you can bet, with pretty good odds, that philosophy is about to have a moment. Probably the biggest since the 1960s, when new advances in life-saving technology like dialysis and organ transplants gave rise to the new philosophical sub-discipline, medical ethics, which was charged with sorting out questions like, “if you have 50 people requiring dialysis to live, and you have capacity to serve only six, what do you do?”.
Of course, ethics with a capital “E” has been considering this type of human problem since before the pre-Socratics, as was pointed out repeatedly by one of my old crusty philosophy profs at UT, who growled regularly about what he considered the ridiculousness of creating a whole new sub-discipline to use the same time-honored philosophical tools that have been around for thousands of years to examine the same type of human problem, except in a contemporary context.
But I suppose that philosophy majors, too, deserve jobs when they graduate, even if they are working for tech bro billionaires willing to pay a few millions to some of them to come up with a code for the coders that might protect, 1) their product lines from being switched off to prevent, let’s say, some bot-inspired human catastrophe, or 2) the tech bros, themselves, from legal liability for the actions of their own digital Frankensteins.
Of course, a much needed case should be made for tech bros hiring axiological stuntmen (ethicists) to develop conceptual frameworks that might protect humanity from the dangers associated with developing autonomous digital things (ADTs) whose actions and evolutions remain entirely beyond the understanding of their creators.
But, no, quite the opposite is happening. The Musks and the Zucks are hiring philosophers to delineate consciousness in such a way as to allow their self-organizing (autonomous) machines the “conscious” designation and the protections that go with it. So the argument: if conscious beings deserve ethical consideration, as they surely do, and if AI bots are conscious, then AI bots deserve ethical consideration just as humans do. This, you might say, is the biggest “if” of the century.
So the bottom line for the tech bros: if bots are conscious, they (their product lines) must be protected. If they (their products lines) are autonomous, no human can be blamed for their actions. Therefore, hire more philosophers.
I urge all those capable of thought, both lay thinkers and professional thinkers (philosophers), to consider the, uh, ethical implications of this situation.
Recommended reading: https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/ethical-know-how
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