Artificial Intelligence
TECHNOLOGY
MEMBER EXPERTS
Psychological Reality or Technological Mimicry? The Chief Scientist of Australia, Dr Alan Finkel, has proposed a ‘Turing Certificate’ to deal with what he sees as a new and pressing moral challenge: the ethical implications of artificial intelligence (AI). The reference is to Alan Turing, the UK mathematician who in 1950 published Computing Machinery and Intelligence, widely regarded as the foundational document of AI. The project of AI, as Finkel characterises it, is 'to produce human intelligence without the blood, tissue, and goo.' But Finkel’s proposed certificate conflates two different notions of AI. The first raises a moral challenge that is new but not pressing, the second raises a challenge that is pressing but not fundamentally new. The conflation here is not unique to Finkel; in fact, it is a feature of a general anxiety about AI, present in different forms in both traditional and social media. He is just an eloquent and distinguished example. continued overpage... Alter the android, National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Mirakian), Tokyo, Japan (Maximalfocus/Unsplash)
Daniel Stoljar ANU
vol. 1 no. 6
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nteu.org.au/sentry
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