Fyrirlestur í heimspeki: Nathaniel Sharadin

Nathaniel Sharadin heldur fyrirlestur á vegum Heimspekistofnunar þann 18. júní kl. 15-16:30 í stofu 301, Gimli, Háskóla Íslands. Fyrirlesturinn nefnist „The Slavish Labor of Self-Governance: Cognitive Enfeeblement and Political Legitimacy“ og verður á ensku. Öll velkomin.

Útdráttur á ensku

People are presently outsourcing cognitive labor to machines; combined with our nature as cognitive misers, the predictable result is that people will do less cognitive labor themselves and, over time, become somewhat stupider. A natural objection is that this is a moral panic. We've offloaded cognition to writing, calculators, and GPS before, and our cognition is mostly fine. This is an optimistic picture. Why think that this time, it's different? This time is not different; but we should not be optimistic. Earlier technologies offloaded first-order skills we could afford to lose; modern AI assistants target our core regulatory skills -- a suite of practice-dependent cognitive capacities that underwrite autonomous agency. These we cannot afford to lose. This is a pessimistic picture. In this talk, I am primarily interested in the consequences of this pessimistic picture for political legitimacy. I argue that if we face more or less widespread cognitive enfeeblement, the result is what I call wholesale political delegitimisation. The argument is therefore conditional, but I'll spend some time making the antecedent plausible.

Um fyrirlesarann

Nathaniel Sharadin er lektor í heimspeki við Háskólann í Hong Kong. Hann er höfundur tveggja bóka, þar á meðal Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Work (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), auk fjölda fræðigreina í tímaritum á borð við Ethics, Philosophical Studies, og The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Hann er fyrrum rannsóknarfélagi við CAIS Philosophy og Háskólann í Notre Dame. Eins og stendur rannsakar hann fyrst og fremst áhrif nýrrar tækni á siðferðilegan og vitsmunalegan þroska mannfólks.