Other Things: AI, Robots, and Society

摘要

This chapter reevaluates the way we typically situate and make sense of things. It therefore targets and reconsiders the instrumental theory, which characterizes things, and technological artifacts in particular, as nothing more than tools serving human interests and objectives. The chapter investigates the opportunities and challenges that recent developments with artificial intelligence (AI), learning algorithms, and social robots pose to the standard default understanding. According to Turing's stipulations, if a machine is capable of successfully simulating a human being in communicative interactions to such an extent that human interlocutors cannot tell whether they are talking with a machine or another human being, then that device would need to be considered intelligent. We can try to respond to these things as we typically have, treating these increasingly social and interactive mechanisms as mere instruments or tools. The instrumentalist way of thinking may be ontologically correct, but it is socially inept and out of touch.