On Thursday, March 19, at 7:00 p.m. in the Simperman Hall Wiegand Amphitheatre, the Carroll College Department of Philosophy will host Prof. Nir Eisikovits, founding director of the Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston.
Anyone following tech news in the last few years has heard one version or another of the following argument: "The time for AI skepticism has come and gone. The technology will shape the future, whether we like it or not. One has the choice to learn how to use it or to be left behind." Generative AI is new, but such claims are not. We have been making arguments about technological determinism since at least the invention of the printing press. And, in fairness, the determinists are often right. But when a new technology is understood this way, the burden of proof to show that it’s useful shifts from the innovators to those who are subjected to their innovations. As a result, ordinary people, told that they must keep up or become obsolete, end up feeling alienated. Technology that is supposed to feed our sense of agency ends up deflating it. In a famous essay titled “On Being Conservative” the mid twentieth century British philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, offers a distinction between change and innovation. Change (aging, the death of friends) is forced on us, while we actively initiate innovations. But that means that innovations are never, by definition, inevitable (only change is) and it’s fair to ask whether they improve things. The “AI is coming like it or not” rhetoric flubs the distinction between change and innovation. It represents an innovation (AI’s growth) as a change.
Free and open to the public. Part of the Annual Philosophy Now Series. The Philosophy Now series addresses philosophical questions arising from contemporary social and political life.