Navigating the AI Age: A Philosopher's Perspective

Published On Sat Apr 26 2025

Ask the ethicist: How to create guardrails for the AI age | On Point

Will AI devastate humanity or uplift it? Philosopher Christopher DiCarlo's new book examines how we can navigate when AI surpasses human capacity.

Part I

Artificial intelligence, essentially where machines do things that require human smarts is not only here to stay, but it's growing exponentially. With the potential to completely transform society. So the world's tech leaders are in a race to try to harness the power of AI, and most of them insist that it's going to benefit all of us.Take Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos.

JEFF BEZOS: There's no institution in the world that cannot be improved with machine learning.

Or Apple CEO, Tim Cook.

TIM COOK: I have a very positive and optimistic view of AI.

Optimistic in part because it's believed that the world's first trillionaire will be the person who masters AI and uses it to improve various aspects of life and work, from performing mundane tasks that we might rather avoid, to actually extending our lifespans.

Part II

Christopher, I want to play a clip of tape here for you from Sir Roger Penrose, a Nobel laureate in physics, mathematician and philosopher, said in an interview this month with the Lem Institute Foundation that he believes concerns about sentient machines are overblown.

SIR ROGER PENROSE: It's not artificial intelligence. It's not intelligence. Intelligence would involve consciousness, and I've always been a strong promoter of the idea that these devices are not conscious, and they will not be conscious unless they bring in some other ideas. The compute, they're not, they're all computable notions.

So Christopher DiCarlo, what do you say to that? Are you ascribing human qualities to a machine and how do we know that if we get to artificial general intelligence or artificial super intelligence, that in fact the machine will act as a sentient autonomous creature?