Philosophy of AI: Tools, Technology, and Human Agency

The invention of advanced AI technology is often said to introduce a radical change in the human form of life. The course will approach this issue through the philosophy of action. At the center of the class will stand the following three questions: In what sense can artificial intelligence support a form of agency? How does human agency differ from it? And how does human agency change because of it? The class investigates these questions by drawing on the history of the philosophy of technology as well as on contemporary debates on AI in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and social theory.

The idea that human beings are tool-using animals is found in Aristotle. Two and a half millennia later, in the 19th century, philosophers were confronted with the radical transformation brought about by the ubiquity of machine production in the industrial revolution. This raised fundamental questions about the reach, form, and value of human agency. For instance, does the machine enable the realization of the utopian promise of liberation from toil, or rather the dystopian threat of the wholesale replacement of human beings? Such questions are anticipated in the work of thinkers like Hegel, Kapp, and Marx. In different ways, they taken up in the 20th by philosophers such as Arendt, Heidegger, and Marcuse.  

Parallel questions are raised today by the radical transformation brought about by artificial intelligence. With technological revolutions of the 19th Century, the importance of the human body to securing our ends was challenged. The recent emergence of AI tools as putatively superior executors of the operations of human mindedness presents a yet deeper challenge to our practical self-understanding. The class investigates the philosophical responses to this challenge by bringing together the traditional philosophy of technology, analytic action theory, cognitive science and contemporary social theory. (A) or (B) and (I) or (II)