I enjoyed the O’Connell article, in part because I agreed with most of it. The most important thing said here is something I have been emphasizing and repeating in the few items I’ve posted about AI: we are witnessing the techno-fantasies and capitalist wet dreams of AI enthusiasts—from philosophers to engineers to venture capitalists—that amply evidence a conspicuously “profound failure to distinguish what is, and is not, truly human.” In other words, and be it deliberately or unintentionally, or via such psychological mechanisms as self-deception, denial, willful ignorance, what have you, what is missing among this motley group of AI aficionados are individuals who have spent sufficient time and laser-like attention devoted to examining and reflecting on philosophical and other works on such subjects as human nature, selves, and personhood; consciousness and the unconscious (and what is betwixt and between them); sentience; the meaning of human dignity; the nature of the emotions; intellectual and moral powers; moral psychology and dispositional character traits; vices and virtues; spirituality; artistic expression and aesthetic experience; the notion of minds and mental life not reducible to brains and neurons; normative practical reasoning and judgment involving time sensitive situations and circumstances involving others; the arts of living together and ethical life; hopes and dreams; spontaneity; leisure; boredom; play; the nature of pleasurable activities; ideals, principles, and values; a sense of humor; aspiration (the ‘agency of becoming’); the quest for welfare, well-being, and human flourishing or eudaimonia, etc., etc. In other words and in short, we are confronted with what O’Connell calls “a wider crisis of understanding.”Report