Updated August 2019
“On the Value and Lack of Values of Artificial Intelligence” by Douglas R. McGaughey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Pdf version with footnotes (rather than endnotes) and page numbers:
Presented in Prof. Otfried Höffe’s
Oberseminar
12 January 2019
Tübingen
On the Value and Lack of Values of Artificial Intelligence[1]
Abstract
An examination of the claims made on behalf of “artificial intelligence” (AI) that it can and will replace human rationality. Whereas AI has the potential to be beneficial (as the case with any product of autonomous freedom), it also has the potential to be extremely destructive. However, the core thesis of the paper is not simply one of a critique of AI by practical reason but a rejection of the materialistic reductionism on the part of the blind defenders of AI. Already in the 18th Century, Critical Idealism pointed out that there is far more to reason than the “hypothetical” imperatives and “culture” of technical skills. We lose humanity when we overlook the a priori synthetic structures of theoretical and practical reason, the reflecting judgment of “aesthetics,” and “pure” religion.
