One might expect that questions such as these might be frequently researched and discussed by philosophers. However, even though philosophers have long considered the question of what makes life valuable in general, our understanding from speaking with experts and searching for literature is that philosophers have not done much work to consider how best to assign quantitative value to different kinds of outcomes.26 For further discussion of philosophical work that is potentially relevant to assigning moral weights, see our previous blog post on the Against Malaria Foundation and population ethics.
Google, which is exploring the use of large language models in its search products, has also been criticized for a lack of transparency. The company sparked controversy in 2020 when it forced out leading members of its AI ethics team after they produced a study that highlighted problems with the technology.
Google weighs in with its own AI ethics ideas
What distinguishes existentialism from other movements in theintellectual history of the West is how it stretched far beyond theliterary and academic worlds. Its ideas are captured in films by IngmarBergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Goddard, Akira Kurosawa, andTerrence Malick. Its moods are expressed in the paintings of EdvardMunch, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, and EdwardHopper and in the vitiated forms of the sculptor Alberto Giocometti.Its emphasis on freedom and the struggle for self-creation informed theradical and emancipatory politics of Martin Luther King Jr. and MalcolmX as well as the writings of Black intellectuals such as Ralph Ellison,Richard Wright, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Its engagement with therelationship between faith and freedom and the incomprehensibility ofGod shaped theological debates through the lectures and writings ofKarl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Martin Buber, among others. And, with itspenetrating analyses of anxiety and the importance of self-realization,the movement has had a profound impact in the development of humanisticand existential approaches to psychotherapy in the work of a wide rangeof theorists, including R.D. Laing, Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, and IrvinYalom.
Lead on setting standards and regulations: One of the greatest strengths the EU enjoys is its ability to set global technical standards in a variety of fields (the Brussels effect). Europe should seek to become a global standard setter in AI and fully utilize multilateral platforms and partnerships with other countries. Rather than a race to deploy AI technology as such, the real race is for setting regulations, guidelines, and best practices so uses of AI take into account socioeconomic, legal, and ethical considerations. Here, the EU has certain advantages that it should seek to better capitalize on. The white paper on AI is a positive step in terms of setting the tone, outlining the normative agenda, tracking developments, informing future regulations, and taking public consultation seriously. However, it is also short on substance and ethics; further, it takes an overly legislative approach to dealing with risks, particularly high-risk AI technologies, which it also does not define clearly.
I'm not always as unreasonable as suggested there, but I was mainly trying to point out that if I refuse to go along with certain ideas, it's not dependent on a controversial theory of meta-ethics. It's just that I intuitively don't like the ideas and so reject them out of hand. Most people do this with ideas they find too unintuitive to countenance.
Whether you want to call it a theory of meta-ethics or not, and whether it is a factual error or not, you have an unusual approach to dealing with moral questions that places an unusual amount of emphasis on... (read more)
My current meta-ethical view says I care about factual but not necessarily moral disagreements with respect to elites. One's choice of meta-ethics is itself a moral decision, not a factual one, so this disagreement doesn't much concern me.
2ff7e9595c
Comments