Artificial intelligence
This theme runs through several big questions. Here are the ones where it plays out.
The questions that illuminate it
Does technological progress improve the human condition?
Each new tool frees us from old burdens, but breeds dependencies and powers we barely control; does technology serve our ends, or silently transform our desires and even who we are? To take a position is to say whether technical progress is a promise to seize or a hold to keep watch over.
Should we use technology to enhance human nature beyond healing?
Healing repairs what falters, but should we go further, and make ourselves stronger, smarter, all but immortal? To refuse is perhaps to accept limits and sufferings we could lift; to accept is to risk dissolving what makes us human and opening a gulf between enhanced human beings and ordinary ones. To take a position is to say what, in us, must remain untouchable.
Could a machine ever truly think?
If thinking is only a matter of organization, a machine could genuinely think, and we might owe it something. If running a program is not enough, our machines merely imitate, though an artifact of another kind might one day succeed. And if thought is inseparable from life, the most brilliant machine will remain a thing. To take a position is to say what makes a mind.
Can a science of the brain fully explain lived experience?
Pain, the red I see, the taste of coffee: cognitive science describes ever more finely the brain mechanisms that accompany them, but does it explain what it is like to undergo them? To take a position is to say whether lived experience is a mechanism like any other, an illusion of introspection, or the sign that the mind exceeds anything neuroscience will ever grasp.