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Stephen Wolfram thinks we need philosophers working on big questions around AI

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For example, when you start talking about how to put guardrails on AI, these are essentially philosophical questions. “Sometimes in the tech industry, when people talk about how we should set up this or that thing with AI, some may say, ‘Well, let’s just get AI to do the right thing.’ And that leads to, ‘Well, what is the right thing?’” And determining moral choices is a philosophical exercise.

He says he has had “horrifying discussions” with companies that are putting AI out into the world, clearly without thinking about this. “The attempted Socratic discussion about how you think about these kinds of issues, you would be shocked at the extent to which people are not thinking clearly about these issues. Now, I don’t know how to resolve these issues. That’s the challenge, but it’s a place where these kinds of philosophical questions, I think, are of current importance.” ...

 “Science is an incremental field where you’re not expecting that you’re going to be confronted with a major different way of thinking about things.” ...

“And this question of ‘if the AIs run the world, how do we want them to do that? How do we think about that process? What’s the kind of modernization of political philosophy in the time of AI?’ These kinds of things, this goes right back to foundational questions that Plato talked about,” he told students. ...

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/25/stephen-wolfram-thinks-we-need-philosophers-working-on-big-questions-around-ai