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Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Science Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science Fiction. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 22, 2019

Why Behavioral Scientists Need to Think Harder About the Future

Ed Brandon
www.behavioralscientist.org
Originally published January 17, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

It’s true that any prediction made a century out will almost certainly be wrong. But thinking carefully and creatively about the distant future can sharpen our thinking about the present, even if what we imagine never comes to pass. And if this feels like we’re getting into the realms of (behavioral) science fiction, then that’s a feeling we should lean into. Whether we like it or not, futuristic visions often become shorthand for talking about technical concepts. Public discussions about A.I. safety, or automation in general, rarely manage to avoid at least a passing reference to the Terminator films (to the dismay of leading A.I. researchers). In the behavioral science sphere, plodding Orwell comparisons are now de rigueur whenever “government” and “psychology” appear in the same sentence. If we want to enrich the debate beyond an argument about whether any given intervention is or isn’t like something out of 1984, expanding our repertoire of sci-fi touch points can help.

As the Industrial Revolution picked up steam, accelerating technological progress raised the possibility that even the near future might look very different to the present. In the nineteenth century, writers such as Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, and H. G. Wells started to write about the new worlds that might result. Their books were not dry lists of predictions. Instead, they explored the knock-on effects of new technologies, and how ordinary people might react. Invariably, the most interesting bits of these stories were not the technologies themselves but the social and dramatic possibilities they opened up. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, there is the horror of creating something you do not understand and cannot control; in Wells’s War of the Worlds, peripeteia as humans get dislodged from the top of the civilizational food chain.

The info is here.

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Who Is Rachael? Blade Runner and Personal Identity

Helen Beebee
iai news
Originally posted October 5, 2017

It’s no coincidence that a lot of philosophers are big fans of science fiction. Philosophers like to think about far-fetched scenarios or ‘thought experiments’, explore how they play out, and think about what light they can shed on how we should think about our own situation. What if you could travel back in time? Would you be able to kill your own grandfather, thereby preventing him from meeting your grandmother, meaning that you would never have been born in the first place? What if we could somehow predict with certainty what people would do? Would that mean that nobody had free will? What if I was really just a brain wired up to a sophisticated computer running virtual reality software? Should it matter to me that the world around me – including other people – is real rather than a VR simulation? And how do I know that it’s not?

Questions such as these routinely get posed in sci-fi books and films, and in a particularly vivid and thought-provoking way. In immersing yourself in an alternative version of reality, and by identifying or sympathising with the characters and seeing things from their point of view, you can often get a much better handle on the question. Philip K. Dick – whose Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, first published in 1968, is the story on which the 1982 film Blade Runner is based –  was a master at exploring these kinds of philosophical questions. Often the question itself is left unstated; his characters are generally not much prone to philosophical rumination on their situation. But it’s there in the background nonetheless, waiting for you to find it and to think about what the answer might be.

Some of the questions raised by the original Dick story don’t get any, or much, attention in Blade Runner. Mercerism – the peculiar quasi-religion of the book, which is based on empathy and which turns out to be founded on a lie  – doesn’t get a mention in the film. And while, in the film as in the book, the capacity for empathy is what (supposedly) distinguishes humans from androids (or, in the film, replicants; apparently by 1982 ‘android’ was considered too dated a word), in the film we don’t get the suggestion that the purported significance of empathy, through its role in Mercerism, is really just a ploy: a way of making everyone think that androids lack, as it were, the essence of personhood, and hence can be enslaved and bumped off with impunity.

The article is here.

Thursday, August 24, 2017

Brain Augmentation: How Scientists are Working to Create Cyborg Humans with Super Intelligence

Hannah Osborne
Newsweek
Originally published June 14, 2017

For most people, the idea of brain augmentation remains in the realms of science fiction. However, for scientists across the globe, it is fast becoming reality—with the possibility of humans with “super-intelligence” edging ever closer.

In laboratory experiments on rats, researchers have already been able to transfer memories from one brain to another. Future projects include the development of telepathic communication and the creation of “cyborgs,” where humans have advanced abilities thanks to technological interventions.

Scientists Mikhail Lebedev, Ioan Opris and Manuel Casanova have now published a comprehensive collection of research into brain augmentation, and their efforts have won a major European science research prize—the Frontiers Spotlight Award. This $100,000 prize is for the winners to set up a conference that highlights emerging research in their field.

Project leader Lebedev, a senior researcher at Duke University, North Carolina, said the reality of brain augmentation—where intelligence is enhanced by brain implants—will be part of everyday life by 2030, and that “people will have to deal with the reality of this new paradigm.”

Their collection, Augmentation of brain function: facts, fiction and controversy, was published by Frontiers and includes almost 150 research articles by more than 600 contributing authors. It focuses on current brain augmentation, future proposals and the ethical and legal implications the topic raises.

The article is here.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Mental lives and fodor’s lot

Susan Schneider interviewed by Richard Marshall
3:AM Magazine
Originally posted February 14, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

3:AM: You make strong claims about thought experiments and find them valuable. Some philosophers like Paul Horwich disagree and find them misleading and useless. How can something imaginary lead to knowledge and enlightenment?

SS: Philosophers face a dilemma. On the one hand, philosophers often theorize about the nature of things, so it is useful to think of what might be the case, as opposed to what happens to be the case. For instance, metaphysicians who consider the nature of the self or person commonly consider cases like teleportation and brain transplants, to see if one’s theory of the self yields a viable result concerning whether one would survive such things. On the other hand, thought experiments can be misused. For instance, it strikes some as extreme to discard an otherwise plausible theory because it runs contrary to our intuitions about a thought experiment, especially if the example is far-fetched and not even compatible with our laws of nature. And there has been a movement in philosophy called “experimental philosophy” which claims that people of different ethnicities, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds can come to different conclusions about certain thought experiments because of their different backgrounds.

I still employ thought experiments in my work, but I try to bear in mind three things: first, the presence of a thought experiment that pumps intuitions contrary to a theory should not automatically render the theory false. But a thought experiment can speak against a theory in an all-things-considered judgment; this is an approach I’ve employed in debates over laws of nature.

The entire story is here.