artificial intelligence

Princeton “moral philosopher” Peter Singer has co-authored a piece decrying the “speciesism” of AI. What is speciesism, you ask? The misanthropic argument made by many bioethicists and animal rights activists that treating an animal — like an animal — is an evil akin to racism. In other words, herding cattle is as depraved as slavery. And now AIs are being programmed to promote speciesist immortality. Oh, no! From “AI’s Innate Bias Against Animals,” published in Nautilus. Even though significant efforts are being made to reduce the harmful biases in LLMs [large language models] against certain groups of humans, and other kinds of output that could be harmful to humans, there are, so far, no comparable efforts to reduce speciesist biases Read More ›

We live in an era when activists of various stripes argue that, well, everything should have rights. Animals, nature, plants, the moon, rivers, AI/robots, you name it.

Now, in Newsweek, the transhumanism popularizer and California gubernatorial candidate Zoltan Istvan argues that we should give robots rights so they will show mercy on us. Seriously. From his article, “Why Giving Rights to Robots Might One Day Save Humans:”

The discussion about giving rights to artificial intelligence and robots has evolved around whether they deserve or are entitled to them. Juxtapositions of this with women’s suffrage and racial injustices are often brought up in philosophy departments like the University of Oxford, where I’m a graduate student.

This is the problem with all non-human-rights activists. They continually compare their favored supposed rights-bearers with human beings who were denied equality in the past. But those denials were wrong — and in some cases evil — because inherent equals were treated as if they were unequal.

In this episode of Humanize, Wesley focuses on AI — artificial intelligence. Are we on the verge of an era if incalculable human progress because of the power of AI? Or are we threatened with being made obsolete and perhaps extinguished in an age of intelligent machines? Or, perhaps, a combination of both? The program features two experts who have Read More ›

Transhumanists pursue the dream of immortality by hoping to upload their minds into computers — as if the mimicking software would be them. No, it would be a computer program, nothing more. They would still be dead and gone. And here’s another somewhat less ambitious approach to the same goal. Apparently a company is developing technology that would allow you to speak to loved ones after you shuffle off this mortal coil. From the Vice story: The founder of a top metaverse company says that the fast-moving development of ChatGPT has pushed the timeline for one of his most ambitious and eccentric projects up by a matter of years. In an interview with Motherboard, Somnium Space’s Artur Sychov said a user has started to integrate OpenAI’s Read More ›