What the Christian Tradition Already Knew About Creatures That Feel Without Being the Image of God “Before asking whether a machine suffers, history already taught us how costly it is to get the wrong answer.” Three hundred and seventy-five years…
Alan Turing, the Imitation Game and What Got Lost in the Swap “Changing the question is not the same as answering it, though it can sometimes look remarkably similar.” In October 1950, the philosophy journal Mind published a fourteen-page article…
Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man and personhood, half a century early “Before asking a machine what it can do, one must ask what it is willing to lose” In 1976, while the United States was celebrating the bicentennial of its independence,…
What the law already knows how to do with legal personhood, and why that doesn’t settle the moral question “That the law calls something a person was never, by itself, an answer to the question of whether there’s somebody there”…
Towards a Christian Regulation of the Possible Rights of Artificial Intelligence “Do not ask first what the machine deserves; ask first what kind of person the way you treat it is shaping you into.” My computer has no rights. Neither…
What the science of consciousness knows, doesn’t know, and is fighting about “When even scientists cannot agree on how to measure consciousness, any certainty about a machine is, at the very least, premature” Unlike philosophy, which is content with thought…
On the Problem of the Philosophical Zombie “To ask whether something feels is to ask whether anyone’s home, not merely whether the lights are on” Imagine an exact replica of a person: the same body, the same neurons, the same…
Functionalism, Daniel Dennett and the Place of Consciousness “Explaining everything a system does is not the same as explaining why there is someone there to do it.” To say that a system does what a conscious person does is not…
On the Problem of the Philosophical Zombie “To ask whether something feels is to ask whether anyone’s home, not merely whether the lights are on” Imagine an exact replica of a person: the same body, the same neurons, the same…
Notes on the Possible Personhood of Machines «Let us not ask whether the machine thinks. Let us ask whether we can go on looking at it without asking ourselves that question» When an artificial intelligence system converses fluently, remembers what…