Sharing the World with Digital Minds

2021 ◽  
pp. 306-326
Author(s):  
Carl Shulman ◽  
Nick Bostrom

The minds of biological creatures occupy a small corner of a much larger space of possible minds that could be created once we master the technology of artificial intelligence. Yet many of our moral intuitions and practices are based on assumptions about human nature that need not hold for digital minds. This points to the need for moral reflection as we approach the era of advanced machine intelligence. This chapter focuses on one set of issues, which arise from the prospect of digital minds with superhumanly strong claims to resources and influence. These could arise from the vast collective benefits that mass-produced digital minds could derive from relatively small amounts of resources. Alternatively, they could arise from individual digital minds with superhuman moral status or ability to benefit from resources. Such beings could contribute immense value to the world, and failing to respect their interests could produce a moral catastrophe, while a naive way of respecting them could be disastrous for humanity. A sensible approach requires reforms of our moral norms and institutions along with advance planning regarding what kinds of digital minds we bring into existence.

Author(s):  
Mahesh K. Joshi ◽  
J.R. Klein

The world of work has been impacted by technology. Work is different than it was in the past due to digital innovation. Labor market opportunities are becoming polarized between high-end and low-end skilled jobs. Migration and its effects on employment have become a sensitive political issue. From Buffalo to Beijing public debates are raging about the future of work. Developments like artificial intelligence and machine intelligence are contributing to productivity, efficiency, safety, and convenience but are also having an impact on jobs, skills, wages, and the nature of work. The “undiscovered country” of the workplace today is the combination of the changing landscape of work itself and the availability of ill-fitting tools, platforms, and knowledge to train for the requirements, skills, and structure of this new age.


Author(s):  
Olufemi Moses Oyelami

Medicine is one of the areas that has benefited from the use of artificial intelligence since the advent of machine intelligence. Different expert systems for diagnosing diseases have been developed; however, they are either standalone or Web-based systems. This puts a vast majority of Africans in general and Nigerians in particular at a disadvantage, because of computer literacy, accessibility, and usage are very low in this region of the world. Recent advances in the capabilities of mobile phones and increased usage, however, have opened up new opportunities for innovative and complex applications that can be accessed via mobile phones. This chapter presents a disease diagnosis system that can be accessed via mobile phones to cater to the needs of the vast majority of users in places where healthcare is inadequate.


Author(s):  
John O. McGinnis

This chapter focuses on artificial intelligence (AI). The development of machine intelligence can directly improve governance, because progress in AI can help in assessing policy consequences. More substantial machine intelligence can process data, generate hypotheses about the effects of past policy, and simulate the world to predict the effects of future policy. Thus, it is more important to formulate a correct policy toward AI than toward any other rapidly advancing technology, because that policy will help advance beneficial policies in all other areas. The holy grail of AI is so-called strong AI, defined as a general purpose intelligence that approximates that of humans. The correct policy for AI—substantial government support for Friendly AI—both promotes AI as an instrument of collective decision making and helps prevent the risk of machine takeover.


Mind Shift ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 396-410
Author(s):  
John Parrington

This chapter explores how future technologies might impact on human consciousness. It begins by discussing how new techniques are continuing to add to the understanding of the human mind. There are many exciting technologies available now to the neuroscientist, such as genomic analysis, optogenetics, gene editing, and brain organoids. To what extent could such technologies be used to investigate the model of human consciousness outlined in this book? The chapter then considers whether artificial intelligence might come to rival that of human beings, and possible interfaces between human and machine intelligence. Our growing ability to develop functioning robots raises the question of whether an artificial human brain might be used to control such a robot, creating in effect a cyborg. However, the creation of such an entity could make a big difference in terms of an artificial brain’s sense of identity in the world, as well as its rights.


Discourse ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 109-117
Author(s):  
O. M. Polyakov

Introduction. The article continues the series of publications on the linguistics of relations (hereinafter R–linguistics) and is devoted to an introduction to the logic of natural language in relation to the approach considered in the series. The problem of natural language logic still remains relevant, since this logic differs significantly from traditional mathematical logic. Moreover, with the appearance of artificial intelligence systems, the importance of this problem only increases. The article analyzes logical problems that prevent the application of classical logic methods to natural languages. This is possible because R-linguistics forms the semantics of a language in the form of world model structures in which language sentences are interpreted.Methodology and sources. The results obtained in the previous parts of the series are used as research tools. To develop the necessary mathematical representations in the field of logic and semantics, the formulated concept of the interpretation operator is used.Results and discussion. The problems that arise when studying the logic of natural language in the framework of R–linguistics are analyzed. These issues are discussed in three aspects: the logical aspect itself; the linguistic aspect; the aspect of correlation with reality. A very General approach to language semantics is considered and semantic axioms of the language are formulated. The problems of the language and its logic related to the most General view of semantics are shown.Conclusion. It is shown that the application of mathematical logic, regardless of its type, to the study of natural language logic faces significant problems. This is a consequence of the inconsistency of existing approaches with the world model. But it is the coherence with the world model that allows us to build a new logical approach. Matching with the model means a semantic approach to logic. Even the most General view of semantics allows to formulate important results about the properties of languages that lack meaning. The simplest examples of semantic interpretation of traditional logic demonstrate its semantic problems (primarily related to negation).


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Ahmed Akgunduz

AbstractIslamic Law is one of the broadest and most comprehensive systems of legislation in the world. It was applied, through various schools of thought, from one end of the Muslim world to the other. It also had a great impact on other nations and cultures. We will focus in this article on values and norms in Islamic law. The value system of Islam is immutable and does not tolerate change over time for the simple fact that human nature does not change. The basic values and needs (which can be called maṣlaḥa) are classified hierarchically into three levels: (1) necessities (Ḍarūriyyāt), (2) convenience (Ḥājiyyāt), and (3) refinements (Kamāliyyāt=Taḥsīniyyāt). In Islamic legal theory (Uṣūl al‐fiqh) the general aim of legislation is to realize values through protecting and guaranteeing their necessities (al-Ḍarūriyyāt) as well as stressing their importance (al‐ Ḥājiyyāt) and their refinements (taḥsīniyyāt).In the second part of this article we will draw attention to Islamic norms. Islam has paid great attention to norms that protect basic values. We cannot explain all the Islamic norms that relate to basic values, but we will classify them categorically. We will focus on four kinds of norms: 1) norms (rules) concerned with belief (I’tiqādiyyāt), 2) norms (rules) concerned with law (ʿAmaliyyāt); 3) general legal norms (Qawā‘id al‐ Kulliyya al‐Fiqhiyya); 4) norms (rules) concerned with ethics (Wijdāniyyāt = Aḵlāqiyyāt = Ādāb = social and moral norms).


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-160
Author(s):  
Khurshida Salimovna Safarova ◽  
Shakhnoza Islomovna Vosiyeva

Every great fiction book is a book that portrays the uniqueness of the universe and man, the difficulty of breaking that bond, or the weakening of its bond and the increase in human. The creation of such a book is beyond the reach of all creators, and not all works can illuminate the cultural, spiritual and moral status of any nation in the world by unraveling the underlying foundations of humanity. With the birth of Hoja Ahmad Yassawi's “Devoni Hikmat”, the Turkic nations were recognized as a nation with its own book of teaching, literally, the encyclopedia of enlightenment, truth and spirituality.


Author(s):  
Allen Buchanan

This chapter identifies a number of developments that are candidates for moral progress: abolition of the Atlantic chattel slavery, improvements in civil rights for minorities, equal rights for women, better treatment of (some) non-human animals, and abolition of the cruellest punishments in most parts of the world. This bottom-up approach is then used to construct a typology of moral progress, including improvements in moral reasoning, recognition of the moral standing or equal basic moral status of beings formerly thought to lack them, improvements in understandings of the domain of justice, the recognition that some behaviors formerly thought to be morally impermissible (such as premarital sex, masturbation, lending money at interest, and refusal to die “for king and country”) can be morally permissible, and improvements in understandings of morality itself. Finally, a distinction is made between improvements from a moral point of view and moral progress in the fullest sense.


Author(s):  
Mahesh K. Joshi ◽  
J.R. Klein

New technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, machine intelligence, and the Internet of Things are seeing repetitive tasks move away from humans to machines. Humans cannot become machines, but machines can become more human-like. The traditional model of educating workers for the workforce is fast becoming irrelevant. There is a massive need for the retooling of human workers. Humans need to be trained to remain focused in a society which is constantly getting bombarded with information. The two basic elements of physical and mental capacity are slowly being taken over by machines and artificial intelligence. This changes the fundamental role of the global workforce.


Author(s):  
Lisa Herzog

The world of wage labour seems to have become a soulless machine, an engine of social and environmental destruction. Employees seem to be nothing but ‘cogs’ in this system—but is this true? Located at the intersection of political theory, moral philosophy, and business ethics, this book questions the picture of the world of work as a ‘system’. Hierarchical organizations, both in the public and in the private sphere, have specific features of their own. This does not mean, however, that they cannot leave room for moral responsibility, and maybe even human flourishing. Drawing on detailed empirical case studies, Lisa Herzog analyses the nature of organizations from a normative perspective: their rule-bound character, the ways in which they deal with divided knowledge, and organizational cultures and their relation to morality. She asks how individual agency and organizational structures would have to mesh to avoid common moral pitfalls. She develops the notion of ‘transformational agency’, which refers to a critical, creative way of engaging with one’s organizational role while remaining committed to basic moral norms. The last part zooms out to the political and institutional changes that would be required to re-embed organizations into a just society. Whether we submit to ‘the system’ or try to reclaim it, Herzog argues, is a question of eminent political importance in our globalized world.


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