Posts
Ethics, Politics, and Society in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
 |
| Photo: Adobe Stock |
On December 2, 2019, a few weeks after his sixty-fifth birthday, Ken Taylor announced to all of his Facebook friends that the book he had been working on for years, Referring to the World, “finally existed in an almost complete draft.” That same day, while at home in the evening, Ken died suddenly and unexpectedly. He is survived by his wife, Claire Yoshida; son, Kiyoshi Taylor; parents, Sam and Seretha Taylor; brother, Daniel; and sister, Diane.
Ken was an extraordinary individual. He truly was larger than life. Whatever the task at hand—whether it was explaining some point in the philosophy of language, coaching Kiyoshi’s little league team, chairing the Stanford Philosophy department and its Symbolic Systems Program, debating at Stanford’s Academic Senate, or serving as president of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA)—Ken went at it with ferocious energy. He put incredible effort into teaching. He was one of the last Stanford professors to always wear a tie when he taught, to show his respect for the students who make it possible for philosophers to earn a living doing what we like to do. His death leaves a huge gap in the lives of his family, his friends, his colleagues, and the Stanford community.
Ken went to college at Notre Dame. He entered the School of Engineering, but it didn’t quite satisfy his interests so he shifted to the Program of Liberal Studies and became its first African American graduate. Ken came from a religious family, and never lost interest in the questions with which religion deals. But by the time he graduated he had become a naturalistic philosopher; his senior essay was on Kant and Darwin...
I end where I began. The robots are coming. Eventually, they may come for every one of us. Walls will not contain them. We cannot outrun them. Nor will running faster than the next human being suffice to save us from them. Not in the long run. They are relentless, never breaking pace, never stopping to savor their latest prey before moving on to the next.
If we cannot stop or reverse the robot invasion of the built human world, we must turn and face them. We must confront hard questions about what will and should become of both them and us as we welcome ever more of them into our midst. Should we seek to regulate their development and deployment? Should we accept the inevitability that we will lose much work to them? If so, perhaps we should rethink the very basis of our economy. Nor is it merely questions of money that we must face. There are also questions of meaning. What exactly will we do with ourselves if there is no longer any economic demand for human cognitive labor? How shall we find meaning and purpose in a world without work?
Read more...
Source: Boston Review
