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Philosophy's centre of gravity is moving. Set the past week's calls for papers, new books, prizes and journal articles side by side and the picture is clear enough: the discipline has eight live fronts, and nearly all of them run back to the same three questions.
When he set out the hard problem of consciousness in 1996, artificial intelligence was still a laboratory matter. In June the book's thirtieth anniversary was debated in Bochum. Chalmers now argues that virtual reality is real, that machine consciousness is possible in principle, and that the real danger lies in erring in the wrong direction.
Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith
Look at the year's leading books together and a pattern emerges. Pollan maps consciousness; Véliz argues that prediction is an instrument of power rather than of knowledge; and Lepore puts a name to whatever is displacing the nation-state: the Artificial State.
The argument of Eric Schwitzgebel's book, out from Cambridge in August, cuts against both camps: consciousness in artificial systems is neither obviously impossible in the near future nor obviously inevitable. The real difficulty is that the moment we have to decide will arrive long before the moment we could know.
Luciano Floridi, Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers, Peter Godfrey-Smith
The world's best-known applied ethicist has moved back to Melbourne, given up rejecting capitalism outright and launched a chatbot trained on his own writings. The question he has been putting for fifty years is unchanged: how should we live? What has changed is the world in which it is asked.
Peter Singer
A study in Philosophy & Technology argues that contemporary visions of the digital future push democratic politics systematically aside — and sometimes propose an openly post-democratic future. The source is not a conspiracy but a contradiction inside modernity itself: autonomy set against automation.
Geoff Keeling and Winnie Street's book in the Cambridge Elements series sets out, in orderly fashion, a question with no answer yet: can an artificial intelligence system have welfare, and if it can, what follows for us? One author works at Google — a detail that explains where the book stands.
Two philosophers in Singapore have launched the first international competition for philosophy papers written by artificial intelligence. David Chalmers and John Hawthorne sit on the panel. The real argument, though, is not about the prize money: what is the criterion for a good philosophical text, and who sets it?
David Chalmers
At the end of August the American Philosophical Association gathered philosophy teachers for a two-day forum called 'The Examined Algorithm'. The question beneath the discussion is not cheating: in philosophy, is writing the record of thought, or is it thought itself?
