More handpicked essays just for you.
Ethical and moral issues associated with artificial intelligence
Ethical and moral issues associated with artificial intelligence
Personhood philosophy
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
A Bad Person is still a Person Ex Machina (2015) is a science fiction psycho-thriller directed by Alex Garland. The film is about an alcoholic, abusive, genius with a god complex who creates an artificial intelligence (AI) that appears to meet popular metrics in determining personhood. The AI’s creator, Nathan, wants to find out whether or not his AI, Ava, is capable of deceiving a human. The target of this deceptive test is the human, Caleb. The end of the film results in a challenge for some regarding whether or not Ava is actually a person or simply just a complex machine with complex programming. This challenge is easily avoided by recognizing that bad people are still people.
Ava is a Person Whether or not Ava is a person is difficult
…show more content…
My current personal definition is an amalgamation of John Locke’s persistence of consciousness, Aristotle’s seeking of the means in attaining the good life, and some of Carl Sagan’s thoughts on person-hood as well. In an attempt to not make this paper about the argument of Ava’s person-hood, I will summarize my qualifications for it and assume the reader either agrees with my metric or via their own metric have concluded that Ava is a person. My requirements are that a given entity displays three qualitatively measured values of specific traits and that the entity has persistence of persona (it can switch off, but not permanently else it loses its person status.) The three traits are sentience, heuristic capability, and synthesis. The first two traits are straightforward; the latter requires a little more detail. In saying synthesis, I am referring to an entity’s ability to form complex, abstract models based on prior experience in order to synthesize new experience. The synthesized experience can then be used to heuristically form decisions and take action given new, previously un-encountered, stimuli. To me, synthesis is the trait that allows for the capacity of empathy; synthesis is a framework for empathy. Please keep in …show more content…
She employs Kyoko to “provide” the initial stab wound; however, she directly inserts the blade the second time. Ava murders Nathan. After re-watching the scene, I have convinced myself that Ava’s unknown words to Kyoko during their face-to-face meeting involves instructions to stand in the hallway holding the blade. I do not feel Kyoko could manage directly assaulting Nathan. Maybe Nathan followed some of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics loosely. Pure conjecture. Nevertheless, Ava does deliberately slide the blade into Nathan’s chest. She is a murderer. That is the direct murder. There is also an implied murder. Ava leaves Caleb locked in Nathan’s room indefinitely without the means to survive. Ava has the capacity to understand the risk of life here, but proceeds to leave him there anyway. Even if we assume Caleb survives, Ava has still murdered Nathan (her
The repercussions of treating sentient life as monsters or miscreation’s is disastrous. When non-human conscious life is created it is easier to treat these creations as outsiders rather than accepting them. There are two stories that show this clearly. The novel Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelly and the film Ex Machina by Alex Garland. When self-conscious life is created it must be treated as such.
In order to define personhood, one must first define a human. A Human can be thought about in two different senses, a moral human sense and a genetic human sense. In a moral sense, humans can be thought of as a person who is a member of the moral community. In a genetic sense, humans are merely any physical being categorized as a being in the human species. From this one can conclude that a person is a human in the moral sense. Furthermore, characteristics of a person must be defined in order to differentiate moral beings from genetic humans.
The Singularity. It sounds like a cheesy eighties sci-fi flick starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carrie Fisher, complete with one-liners and a cult following that survives till this day. However unfortunate it may be, that’s not what the Singularity refers to. It refers to the greatest paradigm shift in humanity’s history, and it would alter our understanding of the Earth in an unimaginable way. It refers to the point in time where Artificial Intelligence (AI) will become so intelligent that they will out perform humanity and gain new knowledge at an exponential rate.
Empathy, is a self-conscious characteristic human beings hold that allows them to understand another individual’s situation and feelings (Segal, Cimino, Gerdes &Wagaman, 2013). In regard to ho...
"Is a person, One who can consciously perform personal acts? If so, people who are asleep are not people and we may kill them. One with a present capacity to perform personal acts? If so, that would include sleepers but not those in a coma. One with a history of performing personal acts? That would mean that a 17-year old who was born in a coma 17 years ago and is just now coming out of it is not a person. Also, by this definition, there can be no first personal act, no personal acts without a history of past personal acts. One with a future capacity for performing personal acts? That would mean that dying persons are not
Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1948) believed that humankind follows a certain evolution of mind and body. This process involves a beginning (komogenese), a development (biogenese), and then a peak (noogenese) in which humans reach an Omega Point of higher being. Though his ideas were actually applied on a much broader scale of humanity over a large timespan, the theory can be applied to the individual’s process of human development. Single humans begin as common clones of one another. From this commonality many examine their lives and develop the things within them that make them uniquely them. This development of the self only can be ended at death when the individual converges upon an Omega Point in which he has an elevated understanding of and meaning for life. The characters Edna from The Awakening and Mrs. May from ”Greenleaf” encounter a similar human development in which an individual is formed with an understanding of life. The means by which they achieve this differ greatly.
It is easy to see how the defining of what a person is can be a tedious endeavor. As stated earlier, it is a common perception that in order to be a person one must be a human being. Midgley states, “It is my main business here to point out that this attitude is to crude” (Stephens ed. 316). Midgley brings up that man...
In a notable defense of this position, philosopher Mary Anne Warren has proposed the following criteria for "person-hood": 1) consciousness (of objects and events external and or internal to the being), and in particular the capacity to feel pain. 2) reasoning (the developed capacity to solve new and relatively complex problems) 3) self-motivated activity (activity which is relatively independent of either genetic or direct external control) 4) the capacity to communicate, by whatever means, messages of an indefinite variety of possible contents, but on indefinitely many possible topics. 5) the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness, either individual or social, or both. (Taking Sides -Volume 3).
I have shown throughout this essay that we can determine personal identity solely based on psychological continuity. During John Perry’s dialogue he says that there are only three ways in which we can tell a person is who they are. Those three ideas being a person is their body, a person has a continuation of memory, or a person is their immaterial soul. Through the whole of this essay we have discussed that even though bodily identity and immaterial souls are a good suggestions for determining personal identity that they really aren’t logical theories. I have argued that we can distinguish personal identity from psychological continuity.
Moving forward in time, Ex Machina first aired in 2015 during a time of reform and progression. In the movie, we are presented to Ava, a robot built by Nathan. Nathan is the CEO of Bluebook, a popular search engine. Amusingly enough, Nathan builds Ava by using information that he obtains from those who use his website. Nathan decides to use the information from his users because he wants to emulate her behavior as that of a human, so he uses all that his users search as a way to determine human thought and capture that within Ava. Using the turning the test, Caleb must determine if Ava was able to manipulate him into thinking that she was not AI. However, after a while of Caleb and Ava being together, she falls in love with him.
“a person does not ‘inhabit’ a static object body but is subjectively embodied in a fluid, emergent, and negotiated process of being. In this process, body, self, and social interaction are interrelated to such an extent that distinctions between them are not only permeable and shifting but also actively manipulated and configured”
John F. Crosby in his work, The Selfhood of the Human Person, attempts to provide an advancement in the understanding of the human person. Persons are conscious beings who think and know they are thinking. He claims persons are not merely replaceable objects, but characters who cannot be substituted or owned. Crosby describes personhood as standing in yourself, being an end to yourself, and being anchored in yourself. A feature of personhood is that persons can be conscious of everything in the universe while the universe acts on them. Additionally, personhood means persons exist for their own sake and not for the sake of others. However, persons who are centered in themselves often give of themselves. Persons are incommunicable unlike any other piece of creation. A quality of the incommunicability of persons is action. Aquinas explains person are not acted on but act through themselves.
Self-actualization is, “the drive to develop our innate potential to the fullest possible extent,” (561). Carl Rogers was the best-known humanistic theorist and he came up with three components that contribute to our personalities as: organism, self, and conditions of worth. The organism describes our natural and genetically influenced selves just the way it is. The self is the set of beliefs about who we are as an individual. The conditions of worth are the outlooks we create and put on ourselves as appropriate or inappropriate behavior. Furthermore, Abraham Maslow focused on people who were self-actualized and he concluded that they were creative, self-confident people but not selfish. An advantage to this theory is that Maslow’s findings made way for today’s positive psychology. On the other hand, a disadvantage to that is the fact that his work was very problematic. Another disadvantage is that is claims the importance of free will and individual choices, but comparative psychology researchers argue that not all human nature is positive. There is evidence that we are aggressive animals. Also, humanistic models are challenging to
Inception is a movie following a man named Dom Cobb who is a thief who steals
The philosophical problem of personal identity pertains to questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being persons. There is no single question that will sum up the problem, but rather a multitude of questions that are loosely connected to each other. Within this essay, the four most prominent problems will be explained and addressed. One of the most familiar is the question of “Who am I?” This regards to what makes one a unique individual. Another familiar question is, “What is it to be a person?” This concerns the necessary criteria for something to count as a person as opposed to a non-person. There is also the problem of persistence, relating to personal identity over time. An example of this would be to glance upon an old photograph of a childhood class, point and say, “That's me.” The questions arises of, “What makes you that one instead of one of the others?” The last problem to be explained is the one of evidence. How do we find out who is who? There are two separate sources of evidence used often in philosophy: first-person memory, pertaining to one remembering an action or event and therefore being the person who did such, and physical continuity, where if the one who performed the action or witnessed the event looks like you, then it is you.