New scientific understanding and engineering techniques have always impressed and frightened.
No doubt they will continue to do so.OpenAIrecently announced thatit anticipates superintelligence AI surpassing human abilities this decade.
OpenAI is calling for top machine-learning researchers and engineers to help them tackle the problem.
But might philosophers have something to contribute?
To begin to answer this, it is worth stressing that philosophy has been instrumental toAIsince its inception.
One significant step was the German philosopher Gottlob Freges development of modern logic in the late 19th century.
Frege introduced the use of quantifiable variables rather than objects such as people into logic.
Still, philosophy has played a role here too.
Take large language models, such as the one that powers ChatGPT, which produces conversational text.
But at their heart, they track and exploit statistical patterns of language use.
But contemporary philosophy, and not just its history, is relevant to AI and its development.
Could an LLM truly understand the language it processes?
Might it achieve consciousness?
These are deeply philosophical questions.
Science has so far been unable to fully explain how consciousness arises from the cells in the human brain.
In a similar vein, we can ask whether an image-generating AI could be truly creative.
Indeed, many people are worried about therising power and influenceof tech companies and their impact on democracy.
Finally, let us briefly ask, how will AI affect philosophy?
Formal logic in philosophy actually dates to Aristotles work in antiquity.
This ultimately allows factual and/or value-oriented assessments of the outcomes.
For example,the PolyGraphs projectsimulates the effects of information sharing on social media.
This can then be used to computationally address questions about how we ought to form our opinions.
