Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the subfield of Computer Science devoted to developing programs that enable computers to display behavior that can (broadly) be characterized as intelligent. On the strong version, the ultimate goal of AI is to create an artificial system that is as intelligent as a human being. Recent successes of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to a new popularization of AI, since these tools are immediately available to the wider population, who for the first time can have real hands-on experience of what AI can do. LLMs belong to the class of stochastic AI.

These developments in AI open up a series of questions such as:

• Will the powers of AI continue to grow in the future, and if so will they ever reach the point where they can be said to have intelligence equivalent to or greater than that of a human being?
• Could we ever reach the point where we can accept the thesis that an AI system could have something like consciousness or sentience?
• Could we reach the point where an AI system could be said to behave ethically, or to have responsibility for its actions.
• Can quantum computers enable a stronger AI than what we have today?

We will describe in detail how stochastic AI work, and consider these and a series of other questions at the borderlines of philosophy and AI. The class will close with presentations of papers on relevant topics given by students. 

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In presence

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