New scientific understanding and engineering techniques have always impressed and frightened us. OpenAI recently announced that it anticipates “superintelligence” – AI surpassing human abilities – this decade. It is accordingly building a new team, and devoting 20% of its computing resources to ensuring that the behavior of such AI systems will be aligned with human values.
Philosophy has played a crucial role in AI since its inception. The early focus on logic in AI owed a great deal to the foundational debates pursued by mathematicians and philosophers. For instance, Gottlob Frege’s development of modern logic in the late 19th century introduced quantifiable variables into logic, making it possible to express general thoughts systematically.
Other important contributors include Kurt Gödel’s theorems of completeness and incompleteness, which are about the limits of what one can prove, and Alfred Tarski’s “proof of the indefinability of truth”. Alan Turing’s abstract notion of a computing machine in 1936 drew on these developments and had a huge impact on early AI.
Philosophy continues to play a role in AI. Large language models like ChatGPT track statistical patterns of language use, which is similar to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language”.
Contemporary philosophy also has relevance to AI and its development. Questions such as whether an LLM truly understands the language it processes or can achieve consciousness are deeply philosophical.
Philosophers like Margaret Boden argue that while AI will be able to produce new ideas, it will struggle to evaluate them as creative people do. She anticipates that a hybrid (neural-symbolic) architecture – one that uses both logical techniques and deep learning from data – will achieve artificial general intelligence.
The development and use of AI must align with human values. This is not just a technical problem to be solved by engineers or tech companies, but also a social issue requiring input from philosophers, social scientists, lawyers, policymakers, citizen users, and others.
AI may affect philosophy. Formal logic in philosophy dates back to Aristotle’s work. Some authors advocate for a “computational philosophy” that literally encodes assumptions and derives consequences from them. This allows factual and/or value-oriented assessments of outcomes.
For example, the PolyGraphs project simulates the effects of information sharing on social media, which can then be used to computationally address questions about how we ought to form our opinions.
Source: https://theconversation.com/philosophy-is-crucial-in-the-age-of-ai-235907