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.
Is lived experience something more than the structure and functioning of the brain?
Pain, the red I see, the taste of coffee: cognitive science describes ever more finely the brain mechanisms that accompany them, but does lived experience reduce to them? To take a position is to say whether experience is nothing more than the brain's organization, whether it adds something irreducible to it, whether it rests on an inwardness already present in matter, or whether introspection deceives us about its very existence. The axis assumes a brain that is genuinely real: those for whom mind comes first and matter is an appearance take their position on the nature of reality. The five positions are presented starting from the most common, a soul of another nature, each further step removing an ingredient from the inventory of the world, until lived experience is denied what it takes itself to be. This is a reading path, not a scale: the distance between two positions is not measured by the gap between them in the list.
Explore this axis and its positions in detail →