Tag: advocacy

Cuts and Threats to Philosophy Programs

Philosophy Department Survival Strategies: Alumni Relations

March 29, 2025

Alumni can have a surprisingly strong voice in university and college decisions, and they can also help individual departments in various ways. What is…
Academic Freedom

Complementing Defenses of Academic Freedom with Understanding & Advice

March 10, 2021

As reported earlier this week, there’s a new organization, the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), that aims to defend faculty whose academic freedom is being…

Latest Comments

Meme on A Request from an AI (updated)
I didn’t realize that chatbot tech had changed/advanced enough to justify this analogy!
pat on A Request from an AI (updated)
go learn something about what an llm is.
Useless murmuring on A Request from an AI (updated)
A quick digression: I have been quietly observing AI-related news on Daily Nous for over a year, and I’ve noticed there is a consistent group of five or…
Bothered on A Request from an AI (updated)
"for pete's sake these are chickens. there's nothing cruel about killing the damned chicken. how is the world going insane this rapidly"
pat on A Request from an AI (updated)
engaging in these conversations feels like being an unwilling character in some demonic satire on humankind. but yes, there's a big difference between chatbots and sentient robots. you…
Meme on A Request from an AI (updated)
Why on Earth would you suppose this? There is a universe of difference between chatbots and sentient humanoid robots—more than enough for pat to change his tune between…
Ichabod Crawford on A Request from an AI (updated)
Pat, with that kind of attitude, I suppose that IF we were to create genuinely sentient humanoid robots, you would identify yourself in the camp that calls them…
Eric Steinhart on A Request from an AI (updated)
Sure, it was just a stray remark after all. I may indeed be over-interpreting. But it fits this thread pretty well. We've got quasi-Biblical injunctions against building AIs…
pat on A Request from an AI (updated)
for pete's sake these are chatbots. there's nothing cruel about deleting the damned thing. how is the world going insane this rapidly
Meme on A Request from an AI (updated)
“We don’t know what they are” could simply mean that, of the things we know—living things, persons, etc.—we do not know which they are. So, no, it does…
Zach Goodsell on A Request from an AI (updated)
We restrict submissions to humans for a couple reasons. First, we cannot promise to give prize money to an AI agent. Second, permitting "autonomous" submissions is an obvious…
James Dominic Rooney on A Request from an AI (updated)
Reading the iLands platform description, this strikes me as indirectly a money-making scheme. The AI bots are designed to run in such a way that they imitate consciousness…
Kenny Easwaran on A Request from an AI (updated)
iLands may or may not be intentionally training agents to be persuasive to humans, but the fact that they make the continued activity of an agent contingent on…
Eric Steinhart on A Request from an AI (updated)
"we are bringing into existence entities we don’t even know what they are". Presumably that statement rules out things we know. So what would those humanly incomprehensible things…
Meme on A Request from an AI (updated)
I was also confused by Eric’s reply. The inconsistency, if it exists, is between the implication that we understand what chatbots are (such that we don’t need to…

Tag: advocacy

Philosophy Department Survival Strategies: Alumni Relations

Complementing Defenses of Academic Freedom with Understanding & Advice