Susan Schneider (1) (1968–)

La tecnologia dell'intelligenza artificiale (AI) solleverà questioni etiche sempre più difficili, sostiene la filosofa, scienziata cognitiva e tecnotopica confessata Susan Schneider in questo impegnativo dialogo tra filosofia e scienza. Come ti sentiresti, inizia speculativamente, riguardo all'acquisto di una "mente dell'alveare", un chip cerebrale che ti consente di sperimentare i pensieri più intimi dei tuoi cari? Ciò presuppone, tuttavia, che l'IA futura possa catturare la coscienza con il calcolo, cosa che secondo lei è improbabile.… (meer)

Another AI book? No, it's a book on artificial *consciousness*, still just a speculative possibility, and other ideas related to transhumanism. Well versed in the mind/body problem, Schneider brings a philosopher's analytical skepticism to many of the ideas. She finds, correctly in my opinion, that mind uploading by copying a brain's informational content to the computational "cloud" would fail to preserve personal identity. As for what I would call uploading by gradual replacement of (say) neurons with (for example) silicon equivalents, she classifies it as isomorph construction or as merging oneself with AI. I didn't well understand her denial that a mind is analogous to a computer program. Still less well did I understand her consideration of a possible analogy between a mind and an "instantiation" of a computer program -- she says first that she means a run of a program and later that she means the thing the program runs on; at any rate, she ends up discarding this idea too. Her overall aim seems more to provoke thought than to present answers, and the mere 152 main-text pages of this highly worthwhile book are certainly thought provoking.… (meer)

Great subject matter, but editor Schneider inexcusably fails to specify which parts are different from the book's first (2009) edition. I had to refer back to the 2009 table of contents to help me estimate that 5 of the 28 chapters have been replaced by new ones. Of the new ones, two are (important, to be sure) analyses by David Chalmers (on the postulated future Singularity and mind uploading) and Nick Bostrum (on controllability of super-AI) that I had already read, and one is a piece of wild speculation by Schneider herself (on extraterrestrial super-AI, featuring citations with misspelled author names).… (meer)