PHIL 143.001 – AI and the Future of Humanity: Philosophical Issues about Technology and Human Survival

Instructor: Ian Kahn. This course meets TR 8:00 – 9:15 a.m. in GA 007.

This course focuses on a variety of issues concerning technology and humanity’s future. Some of the issues we are likely to focus on are normative: Should we care about whether humanity survives into the far future? Do we have moral obligations towards artificial intelligence? Other issues are metaphysical: is virtual reality genuinely real? Can computers be conscious? Could you survive the death of your body by uploading your mind to a virtual world? Still other issues are practical: how could we minimize existential risk to humanity?