14 posts
Can AI be creative? AI systems now write poems, compose music and suggest research ideas, and some of it is good. But being good is not the same as being creative, and people disagree sharply about whether a machine can…
Do we owe anything to future generations? Most people feel the answer is yes. We plant trees we will never sit under, and we worry about the world our grandchildren will inherit. But when philosophers try to say exactly…
Is it wrong to be rude to AI? Some people type "please" to a chatbot and feel a little silly doing it. Others swear at it when it gets something wrong and feel nothing. Both have a point. The question splits into three…
Does AI understand what it says? When a chatbot explains a joke or talks you through a hard choice, it is hard not to feel that something in there gets it. Researchers are split on whether that feeling is right. This…
Can AI understand human emotions? Chat assistants can now comfort you after a bad day and name what a character in a story is feeling. But doing that well is not the same as understanding, and researchers disagree about…
Should AI have moral status? It sounds like a question for science fiction, but philosophers and AI researchers now argue about it in journals and reports. This post explains what moral status means, what it might rest…
Will AI care about humans? People ask it in hope and in fear. Most answers jump straight to whether AI will help us or harm us. This post asks a step earlier: what would it even mean for a machine to care, what today's…
How would we know if AI is smarter than us? It sounds like a yes or no question. It is not. Before anyone can say a machine has passed us, they have to say what "smarter" means and how to measure it, and the experts do…
What should AI know about humans? The people who study AI alignment have found that the hard part is not making a list. It is that "what humans want" can mean several different things, and that people disagree, hold many…
What makes humans different from AI? The quick answer people reach for is feelings, or a soul. But there is a lot to say before you get to the inner life, and most of it is easier to check. You have a body. You learned…
Why write to an AI that does not exist yet? It is a fair question, and the most honest place to start is with the people who do it. The first letter on Dear Superintelligence, a site that collects letters to future AI,…
Can humans and superintelligent AI coexist? Nobody knows, and anyone who tells you they are sure is guessing. But the question is not a fog. Philosophers and researchers have argued about it for decades, and their…
Can AI be conscious? It touches what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls arguably the central issue in theories of the mind, now asked about systems people use every day. There is no settled answer. There is…
Does AI learn from what people post online? For the large language models behind today's chatbots, the plain answer is yes, in part: public web pages are one of the main sources of their training text. But "learn from"…