A Critical Understanding of Artificial Intelligence: A Phenomenological Foundation


Book Description

Artificial intelligence (AI) is viewed as one of the technological advances that will reshape modern societies and their relations. While the design and deployment of systems that continually adapt hold the promise of far-reaching, positive change, they simultaneously pose significant risks, especially to already vulnerable people. This work explores the meaning of AI, and the important role of critical understanding and its phenomenological foundation in shaping its ongoing advances. The values, power, and magic of reason are central to this discussion. Critical theory has used historical hindsight to explain the patterns of power that shape our intellectual, political, economic, and social worlds, and the discourse on AI that surrounds these worlds. The authors also delve into niche topics in philosophy such as transcendental self-awareness, post-humanism, and concepts of space-time and computer logic. By embedding a critical phenomenological orientation within their technical practices, AI communities can develop foresight and tactics that can better align research and technology development with established ethical principles — centering vulnerable people who continue to bear the brunt of the negative impacts of innovation and scientific progress. The creation of a critical–technical practice of AI will lead to a permanent revolution in social, scientific, and political communities. The years ahead will usher in a wave of new scientific breakthroughs and technologies driven by AI research, making it incumbent upon AI communities to strengthen the social contract through ethical foresight, a capability which only phenomenology can deliver, ultimately supporting future technologies that enable greater well-being, with the goal of delivering practical truths. A Critical Understanding of Artificial Intelligence: A Phenomenological Foundation is an essential read for anyone interested in the complex debate and phenomenology surrounding AI and its growing role in our society.




A Critical Understanding of Artificial Intelligence


Book Description

Artificial intelligence (AI) is viewed as one of the technological advances that will reshape modern societies and their relations. While the design and deployment of systems that continually adapt hold the promise of far-reaching, positive change, they simultaneously pose significant risks, especially to already vulnerable people. This work explores the meaning of AI, and the important role of critical understanding and its phenomenological foundation in shaping its ongoing advances. The values, power, and magic of reason are central to this discussion. Critical theory has used historical hindsight to explain the patterns of power that shape our intellectual, political, economic, and social worlds, and the discourse on AI that surrounds these worlds. The authors also delve into niche topics in philosophy such as transcendental self-awareness, post-humanism, and concepts of space-time and computer logic. By embedding a critical phenomenological orientation within their technical practices, AI communities can develop foresight and tactics that can better align research and technology development with established ethical principles -- centering vulnerable people who continue to bear the brunt of the negative impacts of innovation and scientific progress. The creation of a critical-technical practice of AI will lead to a permanent revolution in social, scientific, and political communities. The years ahead will usher in a wave of new scientific breakthroughs and technologies driven by AI research, making it incumbent upon AI communities to strengthen the social contract through ethical foresight, a capability which only phenomenology can deliver, ultimately supporting future technologies that enable greater well-being, with the goal of delivering practical truths. A Critical Understanding of Artificial Intelligence: A Phenomenological Foundation is an essential read for anyone interested in the complex debate and phenomenology surrounding AI and its growing role in our society.




Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence


Book Description

This book deals with the major philosophical issues in the theoretical framework of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in particular and cognitive science in general. The researchers in AI are concerned with the issues of consciousness, human subjectivity, creativity, etc. Cognitive Science and AI argue that consciousness can be artificially created and comprehended in the function of robots. The robotic activities explain the mechanism involved in computation, language processing, sensing the information, etc. Contrary to this thesis, the philosophical study tries to show that human consciousness, thinking, imagination, etc. are much larger concepts and need to be delved into in the broad theoretical framework. This book is a critique of the mechanistic theory of mind. It shows the basic foundation of AI and its limitations in explaining the activities of the human mental life. Machine-functionalism fails to account for the subjective nature of consciousness and the creativity involved in the conscious acts. There are two aspects of this thesis-- the epistemological and the metaphysical. Epistemologically, the subject of consciousness intimately knows the raw feelings or the qualia. Metaphysically speaking, however, the raw feelings are real in the sense that they are part of the furniture of the mental world. Therefore, we can hardly deny that the mental world is real.




Critical Theory of AI


Book Description

We live in an age of artificial intelligence. Machines think and act in ever more complex ways, making suggestions and decisions on our behalf. While AI might be seen as practical and profitable, issues of data surveillance, algorithmic control, and sexist and racist bias persist. In this rapidly changing landscape, social analysis of AI risks getting scaled down to issues of ‘ethics’, ‘responsibility’, and ‘fairness’. While these are important issues, they must be addressed not from an ‘AI first’ perspective, but more thoroughly in terms of power and contention. Approaching artificial intelligence from the often overlooked perspective of critical social theory, this book provides a much-needed intervention on how both old and new theories conceptualize the social consequences of AI. Questions are posed about the ideologies driving AI, the mythologies surrounding AI, and the complex relationship between AI and power. Simon Lindgren provides a way of defining AI as an object of social and political critique, and guides the reader through a set of contentious areas where AI and politics intersect. In relation to these topics, critical theories are drawn upon, both as an argument for and an illustration of how AI can be critiqued. Given the opportunities and challenges of AI, this book is a must-read for students and scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM disciplines.




Responsible Artificial Intelligence


Book Description

In this book, the author examines the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence systems as they integrate and replace traditional social structures in new sociocognitive-technological environments. She discusses issues related to the integrity of researchers, technologists, and manufacturers as they design, construct, use, and manage artificially intelligent systems; formalisms for reasoning about moral decisions as part of the behavior of artificial autonomous systems such as agents and robots; and design methodologies for social agents based on societal, moral, and legal values. Throughout the book the author discusses related work, conscious of both classical, philosophical treatments of ethical issues and the implications in modern, algorithmic systems, and she combines regular references and footnotes with suggestions for further reading. This short overview is suitable for undergraduate students, in both technical and non-technical courses, and for interested and concerned researchers, practitioners, and citizens.




Artificial Intelligence


Book Description

The scientific field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) began in the 1950s but the concept of artificial intelligence, the idea of something with mind-like attributes, predates it by centuries. This historically rich concept has served as a blueprint for the research into intelligent machines. But it also has staggering implications for our notions of who we are: our psychology, biology, philosophy, technology and society. This reference work provides scholars in both the humanities and the sciences with the material essential for charting the development of this concept. The set brings together; * primary texts from antiquity to the present, including the crucial foundational texts which defined the field of AI * historical accounts, including both comprehensive overviews and detailed snapshots of key periods * secondary material discussing the intellectual issues and implications which place the concept in a wider context




Making AI Intelligible


Book Description

Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? One aim of Making AI Intelligible is to show that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Cappelen and Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy of to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they also show ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved: our linguistic encounters with AIs revel that our theories of meaning have been excessively anthropocentric. The questions addressed in the book are not only theoretically interesting, but the answers have pressing practical implications. Many important decisions about human life are now influenced by AI. In giving that power to AI, we presuppose that AIs can track features of the world that we care about (e.g. creditworthiness, recidivism, cancer, and combatants.) If AIs can share our concepts, that will go some way towards justifying this reliance on AI. The book can be read as a proposal for how to take some first steps towards achieving interpretable AI. Making AI Intelligible is of interest to both philosophers of language and anyone who follows current events or interacts with AI systems. It illustrates how philosophy can help us understand and improve our interactions with AI.




Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence


Book Description

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to seep into more areas of society and culture, critical social perspectives on its technologies are more urgent than ever before. Bringing together state-of-the-art research from experienced scholars across disciplines, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of critical AI studies.




Knowing our World: An Artificial Intelligence Perspective


Book Description

Knowing our World: An Artificial Intelligence Perspective considers the methodologies of science, computation, and artificial intelligence to explore how we humans come to understand and operate in our world. While humankind’s history of articulating ideas and building machines that can replicate the activity of the human brain is impressive, Professor Luger focuses on understanding the skills that enable these goals. Based on insights afforded by the challenges of AI design and program building, Knowing our World proposes a foundation for the science of epistemology. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, the book demonstrates that AI technology offers many representational structures and reasoning strategies that support clarification of these epistemic foundations. This monograph is organized in three Parts; the first three chapters introduce the reader to the foundations of computing and the philosophical background that supports the AI tradition. These three chapters describe the origins of AI, programming as iterative refinement, and the representations and very high-level language tools that support AI application building. The book’s second Part introduces three of the four paradigms that represent research and development in AI over the past seventy years: the symbol-based, connectionist, and complex adaptive systems. Luger presents several introductory programs in each area and demonstrates their use. The final three chapters present the primary theme of the book: bringing together the rationalist, empiricist, and pragmatist philosophical traditions in the context of a Bayesian world view. Luger describes Bayes' theorem with a simple proof to demonstrate epistemic insights. He describes research in model building and refinement and several philosophical issues that constrain the future growth of AI. The book concludes with his proposal of the epistemic stance of an active, pragmatic, model-revising realism.




Human and Machines


Book Description

This book shares Chinese scholars’ philosophical views on artificial intelligence. The discussions range from the foundations of AI—the Turing test and creation of machine intelligence—to recent applications of AI, including decisions in games, natural languages, pattern recognition, prediction in economic contexts, autonomous behaviors, and collaborative intelligence, with the examples of AlphaGo, Microsoft’s Xiao Bing, medical robots, etc. The book’s closing chapter focuses on Chinese machines and explores questions on the cultural background of artificial intelligence. Given its scope, the book offers a valuable resource for all members of the general public who are interested in the future development of artificial intelligence, especially from the perspective of respected Chinese scholars.