Philosophy is crucial in the age of AI

New scientific understanding and engineering techniques have always impressed and frightened. No doubt they will continue to.

OpenAI recently announced that it anticipates “superintelligence” – AI surpassing human abilities – this decade. It is accordingly building a new team, and devoting 20% of its computing resources to ensuring that the behavior of such AI systems will be aligned with human values.

It seems they don’t want rogue artificial superintelligences waging war on humanity, as in James Cameron’s 1984 science fiction thriller, The Terminator (ominously, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator is sent back in time from 2029). OpenAI is calling for top machine-learning researchers and engineers to help them tackle the problem.

But might philosophers have something to contribute? More generally, what can be expected of the age-old discipline in the new technologically advanced era that is now emerging?

To begin to answer this, it is worth stressing that philosophy has been instrumental to AI since its inception. One of the first AI success stories was a 1956 computer program, dubbed the the Logic Theorist, created by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon.

Its job was to prove theorems using propositions from Principia Mathematica, a 1910 a three-volume work by the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, aiming to reconstruct all of mathematics on one logical foundation.

Indeed, the early focus on logic in AI owed a great deal to the foundational debates pursued by mathematicians and philosophers.

One significant step was the German philosopher Gottlob Frege’s development of modern logic in the late 19th century. Frege introduced the use of quantifiable variables – rather than objects such as people – into