A Critical Understanding Of Artificial Intelligence A Phenomenological Foundation

Artificial intelligence (AI) is viewed as one of the technological advances that will reshape modern societies and their relations. While the design and deployment of systems that continually adapt hold the promise of far-reaching, positive change, they simultaneously pose significant risks, especially to already vulnerable people. This work explores the meaning of AI, and the important role of critical understanding and its phenomenological foundation in shaping its ongoing advances. The values, power, and magic of reason are central to this discussion. Critical theory has used historical hindsight to explain the patterns of power that shape our intellectual, political, economic, and social worlds, and the discourse on AI that surrounds these worlds. The authors also delve into niche topics in philosophy such as transcendental self-awareness, post-humanism, and concepts of space-time and computer logic. By embedding a critical phenomenological orientation within their technical practices, AI communities can develop foresight and tactics that can better align research and technology development with established ethical principles — centering vulnerable people who continue to bear the brunt of the negative impacts of innovation and scientific progress. The creation of a critical–technical practice of AI will lead to a permanent revolution in social, scientific, and political communities. The years ahead will usher in a wave of new scientific breakthroughs and technologies driven by AI research, making it incumbent upon AI communities to strengthen the social contract through ethical foresight, a capability which only phenomenology can deliver, ultimately supporting future technologies that enable greater well-being, with the goal of delivering practical truths. A Critical Understanding of Artificial Intelligence: A Phenomenological Foundation is an essential read for anyone interested in the complex debate and phenomenology surrounding AI and its growing role in our society.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is viewed as one of the technological advances that will reshape modern societies and their relations. While the design and deployment of systems that continually adapt hold the promise of far-reaching, positive change, they simultaneously pose significant risks, especially to already vulnerable people. This work explores the meaning of AI, and the important role of critical understanding and its phenomenological foundation in shaping its ongoing advances. The values, power, and magic of reason are central to this discussion. Critical theory has used historical hindsight to explain the patterns of power that shape our intellectual, political, economic, and social worlds, and the discourse on AI that surrounds these worlds. The authors also delve into niche topics in philosophy such as transcendental self-awareness, post-humanism, and concepts of space-time and computer logic. By embedding a critical phenomenological orientation within their technical practices, AI communities can develop foresight and tactics that can better align research and technology development with established ethical principles -- centering vulnerable people who continue to bear the brunt of the negative impacts of innovation and scientific progress. The creation of a critical-technical practice of AI will lead to a permanent revolution in social, scientific, and political communities. The years ahead will usher in a wave of new scientific breakthroughs and technologies driven by AI research, making it incumbent upon AI communities to strengthen the social contract through ethical foresight, a capability which only phenomenology can deliver, ultimately supporting future technologies that enable greater well-being, with the goal of delivering practical truths. A Critical Understanding of Artificial Intelligence: A Phenomenological Foundation is an essential read for anyone interested in the complex debate and phenomenology surrounding AI and its growing role in our society.

In the 11 contributions, theorists historically associated with each position identify the basic tenets of their position.Have the classical methods and ideas of AI outlived their usefulness? Foundations of Artificial Intelligence critically evaluates the fundamental assumptions underpinning the dominant approaches to AI. In the 11 contributions, theorists historically associated with each position identify the basic tenets of their position. They discuss the underlying principles, describe the natural types of problems and tasks in which their approach succeeds, explain where its power comes from, and what its scope and limits are. Theorists generally skeptical of these positions evaluate the effectiveness of the method or approach and explain why it works - to the extent they believe it does - and why it eventually fails.ContentsFoundations of AI: The Big Issues, D. Kirsh - Logic and Artificial Intelligence, N. J. Nilsson - Rigor Mortis: A Response to Nilsson's 'Logic and Artificial Intelligence, ' L. Birnbaum - Open Information Systems Semantics for Distributed Artificial Intelligence, C. Hewitt - Social Conceptions of Knowledge and Action: DAI Foundations and Open Systems Semantics, L. Gasser - Intelligence without Representation, R. A. Brooks - Today the Earwig, Tomorrow Man? D. Kirsh - On the Thresholds of Knowledge, D. B. Lenat, E. A. Feigenbaum - The Owl and the Electric Encyclopedia, B. C. Smith - A Preliminary Analysis of the Soar Architecture as a Basis for General Intelligence, P. S. Rosenbloom, J. E. Laird, A. Newell, R. McCarl - Approaches to the Study of Intelligence, D. A. Norman

This book is a collection of writings by active researchers in the field of Artificial General Intelligence, on topics of central importance in the field. Each chapter focuses on one theoretical problem, proposes a novel solution, and is written in sufficiently non-technical language to be understandable by advanced undergraduates or scientists in allied fields. This book is the very first collection in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) focusing on theoretical, conceptual, and philosophical issues in the creation of thinking machines. All the authors are researchers actively developing AGI projects, thus distinguishing the book from much of the theoretical cognitive science and AI literature, which is generally quite divorced from practical AGI system building issues. And the discussions are presented in a way that makes the problems and proposed solutions understandable to a wide readership of non-specialists, providing a distinction from the journal and conference-proceedings literature. The book will benefit AGI researchers and students by giving them a solid orientation in the conceptual foundations of the field (which is not currently available anywhere); and it would benefit researchers in allied fields by giving them a high-level view of the current state of thinking in the AGI field. Furthermore, by addressing key topics in the field in a coherent way, the collection as a whole may play an important role in guiding future research in both theoretical and practical AGI, and in linking AGI research with work in allied disciplines

This outstanding collection is designed to address the fundamental issues and principles underlying the task of Artificial Intelligence.

This book deals with the major philosophical issues in the theoretical framework of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in particular and cognitive science in general. The researchers in AI are concerned with the issues of consciousness, human subjectivity, creativity, etc. Cognitive Science and AI argue that consciousness can be artificially created and comprehended in the function of robots. The robotic activities explain the mechanism involved in computation, language processing, sensing the information, etc. Contrary to this thesis, the philosophical study tries to show that human consciousness, thinking, imagination, etc. are much larger concepts and need to be delved into in the broad theoretical framework. This book is a critique of the mechanistic theory of mind. It shows the basic foundation of AI and its limitations in explaining the activities of the human mental life. Machine-functionalism fails to account for the subjective nature of consciousness and the creativity involved in the conscious acts. There are two aspects of this thesis-- the epistemological and the metaphysical. Epistemologically, the subject of consciousness intimately knows the raw feelings or the qualia. Metaphysically speaking, however, the raw feelings are real in the sense that they are part of the furniture of the mental world. Therefore, we can hardly deny that the mental world is real.

Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? One aim of Making AI Intelligible is to show that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Cappelen and Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy of to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they also show ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved: our linguistic encounters with AIs revel that our theories of meaning have been excessively anthropocentric. The questions addressed in the book are not only theoretically interesting, but the answers have pressing practical implications. Many important decisions about human life are now influenced by AI. In giving that power to AI, we presuppose that AIs can track features of the world that we care about (e.g. creditworthiness, recidivism, cancer, and combatants.) If AIs can share our concepts, that will go some way towards justifying this reliance on AI. The book can be read as a proposal for how to take some first steps towards achieving interpretable AI. Making AI Intelligible is of interest to both philosophers of language and anyone who follows current events or interacts with AI systems. It illustrates how philosophy can help us understand and improve our interactions with AI.