Robot Philosophers

I was surfing today and found the following brand new blog from a university that I have known before. Robot Philosopher is in Spanish and English and proposes to discuss the relationship of man and machine. In a post of several months ago I wrote about a new book by Ray Kurzweil - who wrote the Soul of the Machine and other books. Last fall he published something called The SIngularity In it he gave some impressive statistics about the speed with which we are integrating tasks formerly done by human beings with machines. He argues that the trends are inevitable. What concerned me at the time was whether Kurzweil had ever bothered to think about the ethical implications of these transitions. Indeed, there are some wonderful changes going on. We can do some things much better than we could without the use of machine intelligence. And the possibilities as these technologies continue to branch into new areas are daunting. At the same time however we also need to think about whether at some point we need to begin to think about the role of ethics in this area. We could do this with technology - but should we.

That should not lead us into the narrow alley of Luddite thinking like the anti-technologists that have tried to ban bio-engineering in food in Europe. Wasn't Gregor Mendel one of the first bio-engineers? But it should lead us to begin to go back to the basics in philosophy about the differences between intellect and intelligence. We may need to update Aquinas but then we may simply need to reacquaint ourselves with him and others who thought about these topics.