WPL02153 – Artificial You: AI and The Future of Your Mind 

Humans may not be Earth’s most intelligent beings for much longer: the world champions of chess, Go, and Jeopardy! are now all Artificial Intelligence (AI). Given the rapid pace of progress in AI, many predict that it could advance to human-level intelligence within the next several decades. From there, it could quickly outpace human intelligence. What do these developments mean for the future of humanity? Schneider, a philosopher, urges that we must ask what AI can truly achieve rather than simply writing “what AI can truly achieve”. It is inevitable that AI will take intelligence in new directions, but it is up to us to carve out a sensible path forward. To flourish, we must grasp the philosophical issues lying beneath the algorithms. Can robots really be conscious? Can we merge with AI, as tech leaders like Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil suggest? Is the mind just a program? Examining these thorny issues proposes ways we can test for machine consciousness, questions whether consciousness is an unavoidable byproduct of sophisticated intelligence, and considers the overall dangers of creating machine minds.