InfoCoBuild

The State of Artificial Intelligence: War, Ethics and Religion

Will you be murdered by AI? What if AI were conscious? And will a religion based on an AI god inevitably rise? In his second series about the state of Artificial Intelligence, Professor Yorick Wilks will examine some of the tougher questions about ethics for AI in war zones, whether (and when) we should care about AI as we do about animals, and the impact AI could have on religion. Are we getting AI right?

Yorick Wilks is Visiting Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Gresham College. He is also Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield, a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, and a Senior Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. (from gresham.ac.uk)

Lecture 1 Lecture 2 Lecture 3

Lecture 1 - AI Weapons, War and Ethics
This lecture will explore fully autonomous weapons, the products of AI technology, and the arguments for and against their use. It will then look at the more complex issues of the ethical role of the state in the protection of its population, and the ethical choices of individuals versus those of corporations, whose role in large-scale military-industrial complexes is crucial. The lecture will also mention the emergence of a form of psychopathology in some weapons producers.

Lecture 2 - Can machines be conscious, and would it matter if they were?
The question "Will AI artefacts ever be conscious?" was raised by Turing seventy years ago, and will not go away even though no one quite knows what it means, nor how we would know they were conscious if they were. This lecture explores what its role might be, and the ways in which AI scientists have explored and tried to simulate the possibility of consciousness in machines, while asking whether it would add anything useful if they had it.

Lecture 3 - Artificial Intelligence and Religion
This lecture addresses the potential links between AI and religious belief, which include the question of whether an artificial "superintelligence", were one to arise, would be well-disposed towards us. Religious traditions historically assume that creations are well disposed to those who made them. The lecture also looks at the recent US cults claiming to be ready to worship such a "super-intelligence", if and when it emerges, as well as other futurist discourse on "Transhumanism" and its roots in 18th-century rationalism.