Questions tagged [philosophy]
For questions related to the philosophical aspects of artificial intelligence. Topics such as human/AI value alignment, artificial consciousness, the feasibility of AGI, the ethics of AI, Neo-Luddism, etc.
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Could a paradox kill an AI?
In Portal 2 we see that AI's can be "killed" by thinking about a paradox.
I assume this works by forcing the AI into an infinite loop which would essentially "freeze" the computer's consciousness.
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How could self-driving cars make ethical decisions about who to kill?
Obviously, self-driving cars aren't perfect, so imagine that the Google car (as an example) got into a difficult situation.
Here are a few examples of unfortunate situations caused by a set of events:
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Why do we need explainable AI?
If the original purpose for developing AI was to help humans in some tasks and that purpose still holds, why should we care about its explainability? For example, in deep learning, as long as the ...
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How could artificial intelligence harm us?
We often hear that artificial intelligence may harm or even kill humans, so it might prove dangerous.
How could artificial intelligence harm us?
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Can digital computers understand infinity?
As a human being, we can think infinity. In principle, if we have enough resources (time etc.), we can count infinitely many things (including abstract, like numbers, or real).
For example, at least, ...
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What is the concept of the technological singularity?
I've heard the idea of the technological singularity, what is it and how does it relate to Artificial Intelligence? Is this the theoretical point where Artificial Intelligence machines have progressed ...
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Is the "Chinese room" an explanation of how ChatGPT works?
Sorry if this question makes no sense. I'm a software developer but know very little about AI.
Quite a while ago, I read about the Chinese room, and the person inside who has had a lot of training/...
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What are the minimum requirements to call something AI?
I believe artificial intelligence (AI) term is overused nowadays. For example, people see that something is self-moving and they call it AI, even if it's on autopilot (like cars or planes) or there is ...
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What are the current theories on the development of a conscious AI?
What are the current theories on the development of a conscious AI? Is anyone even trying to develop a conscious AI?
Is it possible that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, that is, once we put ...
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Why can't OCR be perceived as a good example of AI?
On the Wikipedia page about AI, we can read:
Optical character recognition is no longer perceived as an exemplar of "artificial intelligence" having become a routine technology.
On the other hand, ...
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What purpose would be served by developing AI's that experience human-like emotions?
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Yann LeCunn makes the following statement:
The next step in achieving human-level ai is creating intelligent—but not autonomous—machines. The AI system in ...
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Are search engines considered AI?
Are search engines considered AI because of the way they analyze what you search for and remember it? Or how they send you ads of what you've searched for recently?
Is this considered AI or just ...
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What is the idea called involving an AI that will eventually rule humanity?
It's an idea I heard a while back but couldn't remember the name of. It involves the existence and development of an AI that will eventually rule the world and that if you don't fund or progress the ...
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How does one prove comprehension in machines?
Say we have a machine and we give it a task to do (vision task, language task, game, etc.), how can one prove that a machine actually know's what's going on/happening in that specific task?
To narrow ...
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Is consciousness necessary for any AI task?
Consciousness is challenging to define, but for this question let's define it as "actually experiencing sensory input as opposed to just putting a bunch of data through an inanimate machine." Humans, ...
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What are some implications of Gödel's theorems on AI research?
Note: My experience with Gödel's theorem is quite limited: I have read Gödel Escher Bach; skimmed the 1st half of Introduction to Godel's Theorem (by Peter Smith); and some random stuff here and there ...
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Is AI living or non-living?
I'm a bit confused about the definition of life. Can AI systems be called 'living'? Because they can do most of the things that we can. They can even communicate with one another.
They are not ...
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Does the Chinese Room argument hold against AI?
Back in college, I had a Complexity Theory teacher who stated that artificial intelligence was a contradiction in terms. If it could be calculated mechanically, he argued, it wasn't intelligence, it ...
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Why is reinforcement learning not the answer to AGI?
I previously asked a question about How can an AI freely make decisions?. I got a great answer about how current algorithms lack agency.
The first thing I thought of was reinforcement learning, since ...
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Why teaching only search algorithms in a short introductory AI course?
I understood that the concept of search is important in AI. There's a question on this website regarding this topic, but one could also intuitively understand why. I've had an introductory course on ...
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Is the singularity something to be taken seriously?
The term Singularity is often used in mainstream media for describing visionary technology. It was introduced by Ray Kurzweil in a popular book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (...
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What would motivate a machine?
Currently, within the AI development field, the main focus seems to be on pattern recognition and machine learning. Learning is about adjusting internal variables based on a feedback loop.
Maslow's ...
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What are good alternatives to the expression "Artificial Intelligence"?
I read a really interesting article titled "Stop Calling it Artificial Intelligence" that made a compelling critique of the name "Artificial Intelligence".
The word intelligence is so broad that it's ...
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Why do we need common sense in AI?
Let's consider this example:
It's John's birthday, let's buy him a kite.
We humans most likely would say the kite is a birthday gift, if asked why it's being bought; and we refer to this reasoning ...
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Could an AI feel emotions?
Assuming humans had finally developed the first humanoid AI based on the human brain, would It feel emotions? If not, would it still have ethics and/or morals?
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What are the advantages of having self-driving cars?
What are the advantages of having self-driving cars?
We will be able to have more cars in the traffic at the same time, but won't it also make more people choose to use the cars, so both the traffic ...
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Is there a rigorous proof that AGI is possible, at least, in theory?
It is often implicitly assumed in computer science that the human mind, or at least some mechanical calculations that humans perform (see the Church-Turing thesis), can be replicated with a Turing ...
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Is a genetic algorithm an example of artificial intelligence?
Since human intelligence presumably is a function of a natural genetic algorithm in nature, is using a genetic algorithm in a computer an example of artificial intelligence? If not, how do they differ?...
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How important is consciousness for making advanced artificial intelligence? [closed]
How important is consciousness and self-consciousness for making advanced AIs? How far away are we from making such?
When making e.g. a neural network there's (very probably) no consciousness within ...
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Is there a strong argument that survival instinct is a prerequisite for creating an AGI?
This question stems from quite a few "informal" sources. Movies like 2001, A Space Odyssey and Ex Machina; books like Destination Void (Frank Herbert), and others suggest that general intelligence ...
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What is wrong with the idea that the AI will be capable of omniscience?
In the context of artificial intelligence, the singularity refers to the advent of an artificial general intelligence capable of recursive self-improvement, leading to the rapid emergence of ...
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What are the common myths associated with Artificial Intelligence?
What are some interesting myths of Artificial Intelligence and what are the facts behind them?
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Will computers be able to understand user emotions?
I am researching affective computing. Particularly, I'm studying the part of emotion recognition, i.e. the task of recognising the emotions that are being felt by the user/subject. For example, ...
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Why would an AI need to 'wipe out the human race'?
I'm reading such nonsense about how an AI would turn the world into a supercomputer to solve a problem that it thought it needed to solve. That wouldn't be AI. That's procedural programming stuck in ...
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When the AI singularity takes over, what will there be left for us to do?
Since the first Industrial revolution machines have been taking the jobs of people and automation has been a part of human social evolution for the past 3 centuries, but all in all these machines have ...
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Is analogy necessary to artificial general intelligence?
Analogies are quite powerful in communication. They allow explaining complex concepts to people with no domain knowledge, just by mapping to a known domain. Hofstadter says they matter, whereas ...
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Can a technological singularity only occur with superintelligence?
In Chapter 26 of the book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd edition), the textbook discusses "technological singularity". It quotes I.J. Good, who wrote in 1965:
Let an ultra-...
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Should I use anthropomorphic language when discussing AI?
The English Language is not well-suited to talking about artificial intelligence, which makes it difficult for humans to communicate to each other about what an AI is actually "doing". Thus, it may ...
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What is the difference between search and learning?
I came across an article, The Bitter Truth, via the Two Minute Papers YouTube Channel. Rich Sutton says...
One thing that should be learned from the bitter lesson is the great power of general ...
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How would one debug, understand or fix the outcome of a neural network?
It seems fairly uncontroversial to say that NN based approaches are becoming quite powerful tools in many AI areas - whether recognising and decomposing images (faces at a border, street scenes in ...
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Why isn't ethics more integrated into current AI systems?
I am a PhD student in computer science, and currently creating a state of the art overview in applications done in Machine Ethics (a multidisciplinary field combining philosophy and AI, that looks at ...
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How is the "right to explanation" reasonable?
There has been recent uptick in interest in eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Here is XAI's mission as stated on its DARPA page:
The Explainable AI (XAI) program aims to create a suite of ...
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If mankind can create artificial life in a machine, when would we define it's death?
Can one actually kill a machine? Not only do we have problems in defining life, we also have problems in defining death. Will this also be true in artificial life and artificial intelligence?
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Can a neural network work out the concept of distance?
Imagine a game where it is a black screen apart from a red pixel and a blue pixel. Given this game to a human, they will first see that pressing the arrow keys will move the red pixel. The next thing ...
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How is it that AI can become biased, and what are the proposals to mitigate this?
This is not meant to be negative or a joke but rather looking for a productive solution on AI development, engineering and its impact on human life:
Lately with my Google searches, the AI model keeps ...
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How can an AI freely make decisions?
Suppose a deep neural network is created using Keras or Tensorflow. Usually, when you want to make a prediction, the user would invoke model.predict. However, how ...
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Could humans hurt a conscious or sentient AI?
If a conscious AI is possible, would it also be possible for someone who knows what they are doing to torture (or hurt) the AI? Could this be avoided? How?
This question deals with computer-based AI, ...
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Is artificial life really life or not?
I define Artificial Life as a "simulation" or "copy" of life. However, should it be considered a simulation or copy?
If one had motivation and money, someone could theoretically ...
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Can an AI learn to suffer?
I had first this question in mind "Can an AI suffer?". Suffering is important for human beings. Imagine that you are damaging your heel. Without pain, you will continue to harm it. Same for an AI. But ...
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What event would confirm that we have implemented an AGI system?
I was listening to a podcast on the topic of AGI and a guest made an argument that if strong music generation were to happen, it would be a sign of "true" intelligence in machines because of ...
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