Philosophy of Computer Science: Online Resources

Further Readings for Chapter 19:

Computer Ethics II:
Should We Build Artificial Intelligences?

Note 1: Many of these items are online; links are given where they are known. Other items may also be online; an internet search should help you find them.

Note 2: In general, works are listed in chronological order. (This makes it easier to follow the historical development of ideas.)

§19.1: Introduction

• Further Reading on AI ethics:
  • Bostrom, N. and Yudkowsky, E. (2011). The ethics of artificial intelligence. In Frankish, K. and Ramsey, W., editors, The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, pages 316–334. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK

  • Nevejans, N. (2016). European civil law rules in robotics. Technical Report PE 571.379, Directorate-General for Internal Policies, Policy Department C: Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs, Brussels.

  • Floridi, L., et al. (2018). AI4People — an ethical framework for a good AI society: Opportunities, risks, principles, and recommendations. Minds and Machines, 28(4):689 707

  • Dietrich, E., Fields, C., Sullins, J.P., van Heuveln, B., and Zebrowski, R. (2021). Great Philosophical Objections to Artificial Intelligence: The History and Legacy of the AI Wars. Bloomsbury Academic, London, Chs. 8–9.

  • Floridi, Luciano (2024), "Introduction to the Special Issues: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: Exacerbated Problems, Renewed Problems, Unprecedented Problems", American Philosophical Quarterly 61(4):301–307.

• On robots, see:
  • Robots were introduced in Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R.: Rossom's Universal Robots:
    • Translated by Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair
    • Translated into English by David Wyllie
    • See also the links at "Jerz's Literacy Weblog (est. 1999)" (including a link to a YouTube video production)

  • Mendelsohn, D. (2015). The robots are winning! New York Review of Books, 62(10):51–54.
    • A review of the films Her and Ex Machina
    • Surveys the history of robots in literature from The Iliad on.

  • On robot ethics, see §19.6, below.

• On artificial life (or, more neutrally, "complex adaptive systems" or "simulation of adaptive behavior"):

  • For an overview, see "Artificial Life" (Wikipedia).

  • Early A-Life conferences include:

    • Langton, C.G., editor (1989). Artificial Life: The Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (September 1987, Los Alamos). Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.

    • Meyer, J.-A. and Wilson, S.W., editors (1991). From Animals to Animats: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

    • Langton, C.G., Taylor, C., Farmer, J.D., and Rasmussen, S., editors (1992). Artificial Life II: Proceedings of the Workshop on Artificial Life (February 1990, Santa Fe). Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.

    • Meyer, J.-A., Roitblat, H.L., and Wilson, S.W., editors (1992). From Animals to Animats: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

    • Varela, F.J. and Bourgine, P., editors (1992). Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the 1st European Conference on Artificial Life. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

    • Langton, C.G., editor (1994). Artificial Life III: Proceedings of the Workshop on Artificial Life (June 1992, Santa Fe). Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.

    • Brooks, R.A. and Maes, P., editors (1994). Artificial Life IV: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

    • Cliff, D., Husbands, P., Meyer, J.-A., and Wilson, S.W., editors (1994). From Animals to Animats 3: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

  • There is an International Society for Artificial Life

  • And there is a journal: Artificial Life

  • For an overview of the status of A-Life research, circa 2024, see:
    • Krakauer, David C.; & Kempes, Chris (2024), "Problem-Solving Matter", Aeon (17 September).

• Lem's story is reprinted and discussed in:
  • Hofstadter, D.R. and Dennett, D.C. (1981). Reflections [on Lem 1971]. In Hofstadter, D.R. and Dennett, D.C., editors, The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, pages 317–320. Basic Books, New York.

  • Many other stories investigate the relationships between humans and their robotic creations; I highly recommend:
    • Powers 1995

    • Chiang, T. (2019). The lifecycle of software objects. In Exhalation, pages 62–172. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

    • McEwan, I. (2019). Machines Like Me, and People Like You. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, New York.
      • Reviewed in Lucas 2019

  • On the "reality" vs the "virtuality" of Lem-like entities, see:
    • Chalmers 2017

    • Ludlow, P. (2019). The social furniture of virtual worlds. Disputatio, 11(55):345–369.

  

• For a perspective from Orthodox Judaism on whether we should build AIs (with reference to the story of the Golem(*)), see:
  • Navon, Mois (2024), "Let Us Make Man in Our Image—A Jewish Ethical Perspective on Creating Conscious Robots", AI and Ethics 4:1235–1250.

  (*) On the Golem, see the Philosophical, Historical, and Literary Digression in §3.14 (p.67) of this book.
  

§19.2: Is AI Possible in Principle?

• On functionalism, see:
  • Fodor, J.A. (1981). The mind-body problem. Scientific American, 244(1):114–123.
    • A good overview of functionalism.

  • For more contemporary versions of functionalism and objections to them, see:
    • Block 1995

    • Shagrir, O. (2005). The rise and fall of computational functionalism. In Ben-Menahem, Y., editor, Hilary Putnam (Contemporary Philosophy in Focus), pages 220–250. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

    • Maley, C. and Piccinini, G. (2013). Get the latest upgrade: Functionalism 6.3.1. Philosophia Scientiae, 17(2):135–149.

    • Piccinini 2020

    • Rescorla 2020

    • Levin, Janet, Functionalism, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

• On the related problem of qualia, see:
  • Byrne, Alex, Inverted Qualia, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

  • Tye, Michael, Qualia, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

• On computational personality, see:
  • Reid Simmons's "Social Robots Project",

  • the "Cog" project at MIT

• On emotion, see:
  • Computational theories of emotion:
    • Sloman, A. and Croucher, M. (1981). Why robots will have emotions. In Proceedings of IJCAI 1981, pages 197–202.

    • Picard, R.W. (1995), "Affective Computing", MIT Media Laboratory Perceptual Comuting Section Technical Report No. 321
      

    • Picard, R. (1997). Affective Computing. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

    • Minsky, M. (2006). The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. Pantheon, New York.

    • Thagard, P. (2006). Hot Thought: Mechanisms and Applications of Emotional Cognition. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

    • Tian, L.; et al. (2022). Applied Affective Computing. ACM Books/Morgan & Claypool, New York.

  • On the cognitive science of emotion, see my bibliography on the topic.

  • And the IEEE Standards Association is preparing a "Standard for Ethical considerations in Emulated Empathy in Autonomous and Intelligent Systems".

§19.3: What Is a Person?

• Besides AIs, the question of what a person is affects debates on abortion (Is a fetus a person? What about an embryo? What about a zygote?), the nature of animals (Are chimpanzees persons? What about dolphins? Or elephants?), and (at a somewhat more theoretical level) the nature of extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI).

• Tooley, Michael (1976), "Would ETIs Be Persons?", in James L. Christian (ed.), Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Buffalo: Prometheus):129–145.
  

• Foerst, A. (2001). Commander Data: A candidate for Harvard Divinity School? In Sharma, A., editor, Religion in a Secular City: Essays in Honor of Harvey Cox. Trinity Press International, Harrisburg, PA.
  • Analyzes the concept of personhood by reference to whether the fictional android Commander Data, from the TV series "Star Trek: The Next Generation", is a person.

• Solaiman, S. (2017). Legal personality of robots, corporations, idols and chimpanzees: A quest for legitimacy. Artificial Intelligence and Law, 25:155–179.
  • A good survey of the issues and a guide to the literature on personhood.

• Strohminger, Nina; & Jordan, Matthew R. (2022), "Corporate Insecthood", Cognition 224
  • A highly readable study of peoples' intuitions about what constitutes personhood; be sure to read the footnotes!

• On ethical issues of personhood and moral responsibility, see Müller 2020

• As part of a longer study on "European Civil Law Rules in Robotics", Nevejans 2016 discusses the "incongruity of establishing robots as liable legal persons".

• For a fictional treatment of many of these issues, see: McEwan 2019.

• For more on computational theories of consciousness (in addition to the bibliography cited in footnote 5), see:
  • Butlin, Patrick; et al. (2013), "Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness",

  which surveys several theories of consciousness and explores whether any current or future AI systems could be considered to be "conscious" according to any of them. (Spoiler: Their answer for current systems is "no"; their answer for future systems is "yes".)

§19.4: Rights:

• A predecessor of Petersen's paper is:
  • Allen, C., Varner, G., and Zinser, J. (2000). Prolegomena to any future moral agent. Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 12:251–261.
    • "Human-like performance, which is prone to include immoral actions, may not be acceptable in machines, but moral perfection may be computationally unattainable. … The development of machines with enough intelligence to assess the effects of their actions on sentient beings and act accordingly may ultimately be the most important task faced by the designers of artificially intelligent automata."

• Petersen continues his argument in:
  • Petersen, S. (2011). Designing people to serve. In Lin, P., Abney, K., and Bekey, G.A., editors, Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics, pages 283–298. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

• For a response, see:
  • Danaher, J. (2013, 22 April). Is there a case for robot slaves? Philosophical Disquisitions

• Yampolskiy, R.V. and Fox, J. (2013). Safety engineering for artificial general intelligence. Topoi, 32(2):217–226.
  • "attempts to attribute moral agency and assign rights to all intelligent machines are misguided". (from the abstract)

• Schwitzgebel, Eric (2023, 12 January 2023), "The Coming Robot Rights Catastrophe", Blog of the APA [American Philosophical Association]
  • Explores the nature of the rights that robots might be entitled to, and the disputes that will arise over them.

§19.6: Personal AIs and Morality:

• For an excellent survey of these issues (which also discusses Asimov's Three Laws), see:
  • Allen, Colin; Varner, Gary; & Zinser, Jason (2000), "Prolegomena to Any Future Artificial Moral Agent", Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 12: 251–261.

• A clearly argued essay arguing that "functionally sophisticated artificial intelligences might still be the appropriate objects of reactive attitudes, like love, and thus still be the appropriate objects of moral concern, even if they lack consciousness" is:
  • Antill, Gregory (2024), "Robots and Reactive Attitudes: A Defense of the Moral and Interpersonal Status of Non-Conscious Agents", AI Ethics.

• The most famous fictional treatment of robot morality is in the stories of Isaac Asimov that discuss his "Three Laws of Robotics":
  1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

  Later, he added a "zeroth" law, specifying that the other three laws only held if they did not conflict with it:

  0. A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
  • For an extended discussion of Asimov's Laws, in a computer engineering journal, see:
    • Clarke, R. (1993–1994). Asimov’s laws of robotics: Implications for information technology.
      • Part 1. IEEE Computer, 26(12):53–61.
      • Part 2. IEEE Computer, 27(1):57–66.

  • James Bridle — quoted in Lucas, J. (2019, 22 April). Madam, I'm Adam (Man, woman, and robot in Ian McEwen's new novel). The New Yorker, pages 68–70 — adds another law (recall the Black Box problem):
    • "A robot — or any other intelligent machine — must be able to explain itself to humans"

  • Although the authors do not mention Asimov's laws, Hadfield-Menell et al. (2017), "The Off-Switch Game", discusses the conditions under which a robot has the incentive to switch itself off. Their notion of the robot's information about the human's "utility" seems akin to Asimov's second law.

  • See also:

    Kan, Michael (2024, 4 January), "Google Taps Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics for Real Robot Safety", PCMag

    which notes, "The irony is that the Three Laws of Robotics are flawed. Asimov essentially used them as plot device[s] to drive stories about how the ambiguities in the laws can still result in conflict and conspiracy."

• On parenting, see:
  • Rini, R. (2017, 18 April). Raising good robots. Aeon
    • Suggests that "We already have a way to teach morals to alien intelligences: it's called parenting", and she suggests "apply[ing] the same methods to robots".

  • The parenting of robots is treated fictionally in Chiang 2019

§19.7: Are We Personal AIs?

• The Simulation Argument:
  • Bostrom's papers are available at "The Simulation Argument" website.

  • For critiques of his theory, see:
    • Papakonstantinou, Y. (2015). Created computed universe. Communications of the ACM, 58(6):36–38.

    • Rothman, J. (2016, 9 June). What are the odds we are living in a computer simulation? The New Yorker (online).

    • And, especially: Chalmers 2022.

  • Perhaps the first treatment of these issues was Descartes's "evil genius" (or "evil demon") argument in his Meditations:
    • Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on first philosophy. In Haldane, E.S. and Ross, G., editors, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, pages 131–199. Cambridge University Press, 1970, Cambridge, UK.

      • "I will suppose … that there is … a certain evil genius … who employed all his trickery to deceive me. I will think that … all the external things that we see are only illusions and deceptions … . I will consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, as not having any sense, but falsely believing to have all these things."
        (Translation from Rapaport, W.J. (1987). God, the demon, and the cogito)

      • Descartes argues that the one thing the evil genius can't fool him about is that he is doubting things, that doubting is a kind of thinking, and that, if he thinks, then he exists.

  • One of the earliest contemporary philosophical treatments of a simulation argument is Hilary Putnam's "Brains in a Vat" argument:
    • Putnam, H. (1981). Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

    • For an overview, see the above link, as well as:
      • McKinsey, Michael, Skepticism and Content Externalism, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

  • The movie The Matrix (and its sequels) is the most famous recent science-fiction treatment of this.
    For a philosophical analysis, see:
    • Chalmers, D.J. (2005). The Matrix as metaphysics. In Grau, C., editor, Philosophers Explore The Matrix, pages 132–176. Oxford University Press, New York

  • Hoffman, D.D. (2009). The interface theory of perception: Natural selection drives true perception to swift extinction. In Dickinson, S., Tarr, M., Leonardis, A., and Schiele, B., editors, Object Categorization: Computer and Human Vision Perspectives, pages 148–165. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
    • Argues that our internal mental image of the external world need not bear any resemblance to the actual external world, any more than the graphical user interface for an operation system need bear a resemblance to the "diodes, resistors, voltages and magnetice fields in the computer", on the grounds that what is important from the standpoint of evolution is not accuracy but fitness. "The very evolutionary processes that endowed us with our interfaces might also have saddled us with the penchant to mistake their contents for objective reality" (§1.6).

    • For more on the differences between our internal mental image and the actual external world, see:
      • Yong, Ed (2022), An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (New York: Random House)

  • If we are living in a software simulation, can it be modified? By whom? These questions are examined in:
    • Overbye, Dennis (2023, 17 January), "Are We Living in a Computer Simulation, and Can We Hack It?, New York Times

  • See also:
    • Schwitzgebel, Eric (2024, 11 January), "If We're Living in a Simulation, The Gods Might Be Crazy", Blog of the APA

• The Singularity:
  • As with so much else in CS and AI, Turing was among the first to discuss what is now called "The Singularity":
    "[I]t seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control, in the way that is mentioned in Samuel Butler's Erewhon."
    • Turing, A M. (1951). Intelligent machinery, a heretical theory. Philosophia Mathematica, 4(3):256–260; quotation from pp. 259–260.
    • Reprinted in Copeland 2004, Ch. 12, and Shieber 2004, Ch. 5

  • For overviews of The Singularity, see:
    • Bringsjord and Govindarajulu 2020, §9
    • "Technological Singularity" (Wikipedia)
    • "The Singularity Is Near"

  • For discussions, see:
    • Chalmers, D.J. (2010). The singularity: A philosophical analysis. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 17:7–65, (especially §4, "Obstacles to the Singularity")
      • A symposium on Chalmers's paper is in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 19 (2012), issues 1–2 and 7–8,
      • With a reply by Chalmers:
        • Chalmers, D.J. (2012). The singularity: A reply. Journal of Consciousness Studies

    • Eden, A.H., Moor, J.H., Søraker, J.H., and Steinhart, E., editors (2012). Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment. Springer, Berlin.

    • Davis, E. (2015). Ethical guidelines for a superintelligence. Artificial Intelligence, 220:121–124.

    • Landgrebe and Smith 2023

  • Musk's observations are discussed at "Elon Musk — Artificial intelligence, metaverse, and public transit" (Wikipedia).

  • Hawking's observations are discussed at "Stephen Hawking — Future of humanity" (Wikipedia).

  • Bundy, A. (2017). Smart machines are not a threat to humanity. Communications of the ACM, 60(2):40–42.
    • Argues that "Worrying about machines that are too smart distracts us from the real and present threat from machines that are too dumb."

  • A related topic concerns robots that kill: They might be industrial robots that accidentally kill or harm human workers (something that has already happened), military robots designed to kill or harm enemies during a battle, or post-Singularity robots that decide to kill or harm humans. For discussion, see:
    • Sparrow, R. (2007). Killer robots. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 24(1):62–77.

    • Hallevy, G. (2013). When Robots Kill: Artificial Intelligence under Criminal Law. Northeastern University Press, Boston.

    • Wescott, D. (2013). Robots behind bars. The Chronicle [of Higher Education] Review, 59(29):B17

  • For a science-fiction treatment of the Singularity (long before it was named), see Stanisław Lem 1961.