In a recent blog post, Paul Christiano estimates there is a 20% probability that most humans will die within 10 years of building powerful AI. This assessment is so bewildering that many of us will quickly dismiss it as a crazy prediction rooted in science fiction rather than reality. Unfortunately, it is not the fringe view of some apocalyptic dilettante. Paul Christiano previously ran the alignment team at OpenAI, most famously known as the creators of ChatGPT. And in a 2022 survey of researchers in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computational neuroscience, about half of respondents estimated there is an at least 10% probability of an “extremely bad outcome (e.g. human extinction)” from advanced AI. The timeframe for advanced AI? Of course, it is impossible to make definitive claims, but Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “Godfather of AI” now puts it at 20 years or less, suggesting that even a timeframe of 5 years should not be excluded. This post does not offer any elaborate philosophical argument. Instead, it aims to highlight the pressing need of recognising the most salient issue humanity will face in the near future, which is the rapid development of ever-more powerful AI, and to tentatively explore what – if any – part political philosophers should play in all of this.
Category: General Page 5 of 17
In this post, Scott Altman (USC Gould) discusses his recent JOAP 2022 Annual Essay Prize winning article about the morality of sexual harassment nondisclosure agreements.
Nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) pay sexual harassment and abuse victims not to tell their stories or name their abusers. Harvey Weinstein’s many NDAs, and the #MeToo movement, spurred some states to make such NDAs legally unenforceable.
My Selling Silence article argued in favor of these laws. Sexual wrongdoer NDAs protect abusers, endanger future victims, and undermine deterrence. The article rejected three justifications for wrongdoer NDAs, two of which I will mention briefly before explaining the third.
It is difficult to read anything on the justification of high salaries these days without running into catch phrases such as “the hunt for talent”, “attracting the best people to this job”, or “retaining human capital.” The core idea underlying this kind of discourse is one that has got a lot of traction in political philosophy in recent decades, too: It is justified to pay certain individuals – be they neurosurgeons, lawyers, or CEOs – financial incentives, because the productive contribution they will make in response benefits us all.
This post is the fourth in a series entitled: “The Mahsa Revolution: A Political Philosophy and Futures Studies Perspective”
The goal of this series is to offer readers reflections on the on-going grassroots, women-led revolutionary movement in Iran, to be continued until its completion or the mutual exhaustion of readers and author. I will analyze, for non-Persian speakers, debates and initiatives regarding the future of Iran from a philosophical and futures studies perspective. Every revolutionary moment unlocks the space of the politically and socially conceivable and enables the hopeless to exercise their rusted capacity for imagining better futures. It also reveals normative disagreements on desirable futures, inclusion and exclusion from those futures, and strategies suitable for realizing them. Although I am not an Iranologist, my hope is to give readers a candid glimpse of the burgeoning forward-looking democratic life of Iranians in Iran and the diaspora.
Logo of the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom in Iran that has produced the Mahsa Charter
In my last post, I analyzed the “Mahsa Charter” which aims at unifying the broadest range of the opposition to the Islamic Republic around a common minimal platform for a transition to secular democracy. My reading of the charter was positive—I appreciated the balance it strikes between the demands of different constituencies (republican and monarchists, unitarists and federalists). In short, I saw it as a good starting point for constructive discussion. But in the days and weeks that followed the release of the charter (March 10), I was surprised to discover that few Iranians active on social media shared my view; most received it rather coldly and often attacked it vehemently. Today, I’d like to analyze how the charter was received in the Iranian community, and more specifically, in one of its main online deliberative spaces, Clubhouse, a “social audio” app very popular among Iranians.
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Image by wayhomestudio on Freepik
This post is the third in a series entitled: “The Mahsa Revolution: A Political Philosophy and Futures Studies Perspective”
The goal of this series is to offer readers reflections on the on-going grassroots, women-led revolutionary movement in Iran, to be continued until its completion or the mutual exhaustion of readers and author. I will analyze, for non-Persian speakers, debates and initiatives regarding the future of Iran from a philosophical and futures studies perspective. Every revolutionary moment unlocks the space of the politically and socially conceivable and enables the hopeless to exercise their rusted capacity for imagining better futures. It also reveals normative disagreements on desirable futures, inclusion and exclusion from those futures, and strategies suitable for realizing them. Although I am not an Iranologist, my hope is to give readers a candid glimpse of the burgeoning forward-looking democratic life of Iranians in Iran and the diaspora.
Last month, the Iranian opposition and the Islamic Republic took parallel steps to restructure the political landscape and gather support. On March 10, China announced it had negotiated a deal between the Islamic Republic and Saudi Arabia to ease escalating tensions; on the same day, the “Mahsa Charter” (available in English and Persian) designed to unite the opposition around a common minimal platform for a transition to a secular democracy was released. While international news outlets covered the diplomatic deal extensively, not a single article was dedicated to the Mahsa Charter in major American and European newspapers. This post’s goal is therefore to introduce readers to this charter and analyze it. Since the Mahsa Charter will be new to most readers and is very dense, this post will be quite lengthy.
The way I like to put it is students in a philosophy classroom are regularly given answers without having the questions, and by having that experience first they have a bunch of questions they can then bring to the text.
Professor Stephen Bloch-Schulman, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Elon University, has published extensively on teaching and learning, especially in relation to the practice of teaching philosophy. Like many philosophers, he wants students to critically evaluate their beliefs. However, his approach to actually getting students to do so can be considered unusual – as he does not think people generally are great at explaining what they believe. For our series on Teaching Philosophy, Justice Everywhere interviewed Bloch-Schulman about his teaching philosophy and practice.
(The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
Justice Everywhere (JE): So, what do you do that you think is interesting and worth sharing?
Stephen Bloch-Schulman (SBS): I’m quite taken with Eric Schwitzgebel’s critique of intellectualism about belief – as he understands it, the intellectualist view is that we can know what our beliefs are by simply looking inside our own thinking, that we are transparent to ourselves.
I think the opposite is true, I think that we are very opaque to ourselves. I’m not really interested in merely asking my students what they believe and then critically examining what they say, because I don’t actually think that that’s what they believe. What I’m trying to do instead is find ways that students can reveal their beliefs to themselves and to me, rather than asking and assuming what they say accurately reflects their beliefs. I construct all sorts of experiences for them to have wherein they will reveal to themselves, and to me, what their beliefs are without them knowing that that is what they are doing.
From the long-form essay to concise term definitions, ChatGPT can be an apt tool for students in completing various assignments. Yet many educators balk at its use: they emphasize that ChatGPT makes errors, claim that its use is cheating, and that students using it learn nothing.
What sorts of policies should educators adopt? Our options fall into three main categories:
1) Explicitly forbid the use of ChatGPT.
2) Have no explicit policy: ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’.
3) Explicitly allow the use of ChatGPT.
In this post, I look at these three options from the perspective of fairness. Since fairness thrives on transparency, 3) seems to me the fairest of them all.
This post is the second in a series entitled: “The Mahsa Revolution: A Political Philosophy and Futures Studies Perspective”
The goal of this series is to offer readers reflections on the on-going grassroots, women-led revolutionary movement in Iran, to be continued until its completion or the mutual exhaustion of readers and author. I will analyze, for non-Persian speakers, debates and initiatives regarding the future of Iran from a philosophical and futures studies perspective. Every revolutionary moment unlocks the space of the politically and socially conceivable and enables the hopeless to exercise their rusted capacity for imagining better futures. It also reveals normative disagreements on desirable futures, inclusion and exclusion from those futures, and strategies suitable for realizing them. Although I am not an Iranologist, my hope is to give readers a candid glimpse of the burgeoning forward-looking democratic life of Iranians in Iran and the diaspora.
While hundreds of Iranian schoolgirls are hospitalized because a mysterious group (probably agents of the Islamic Republic or radicals protected by it) commits chemical attacks on their schools to terrorize them and punish them for protesting the mandatory veil and dictatorship, the diaspora quarrels over the form of Iran’s future regime. During the last few weeks, more and more incidents (in demonstrations and online) oppose monarchists to republicans, with verbal abuse and occasional skirmishes. How can we make sense of such a worrisome trend when support for the Mahsa revolution is vital and maintaining the recently gained unity among opponents in the diaspora indispensable if we want to convince the world that we represent a credible and tolerant alternative to Islamists?
Zsuzsanna Chappell argues that the transformation of fear into anxiety is another example of how the concerns of some members of society are systematically dismissed.