Prosthetic Gods – Details, episodes & analysis

AI Clones 

This week Drs. Nir and J. discuss the concept of AI clones with postdoctoral fellow Cody Turner, and in particular the short podcast series Shell Game from journalist Evan Ratliff. Will AI clones augment or disorient us? Our bonus round discusses J’s recent piece of “free IVF.”

Links: 

Shell Game podcast  https://www.shellgame.co/podcast

Vapi voice clone: https://vapi.ai/

“Digital Duplicates and the Scarcity Problem: Might AI Make Us Less Scarce and Therefore Less Valuable?” by John Danaher & Sven Nyholm   https://philpapers.org/rec/DANDDA-3

“Free IVF? Technoprogressive policy and reproductive rights” by J. Hughes https://ieet.substack.com/p/fertility-assistance-reproductive

Can There Be Bad Knowledge?

In medical ethics there are debates about when people should be encouraged to get tested for diseases or conditions for which there is no therapy, such as Alzheimer’s disease. In the case of knowing you have a risk or diagnosis of incurable disease, is ignorance really bliss, or does “true happiness” require knowledge? What are the ethics of these "bad knowledge" situations?

How early is too early to find out you've got an incurable disease? https://www.wired.com/story/alzheimers-disease-dementia-medicine-prediction-ethics/

The Woman Who Could Smell Parkinson’s https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/magazine/parkinsons-smell-disease-detection.html

Lightning Round

Google hires Character.AI founders https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/02/google-character-ai-noam-shazeer/

https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-appoints-former-characterai-founder-co-lead-its-ai-models-2024-08-23/

Taiwan’s Experiments with E-democracy:

Can AI be good for democracy? Taiwan has been experimenting with digital democracy for a decade. In this week’s Prosthetic Gods Nir and J review the advantages and disadvantages of using electronic tools for citizen participation in politics. And we also talk about the Harris Zoom rallies and the Google anti-trust case.

Tools for Citizen Participation:

Taiwan has experimented with two platforms for engaging citizens in collaborative policymaking, vTaiwan and Join. 

vTaiwan uses the online deliberation system Pol.is to map opinions and promote consensus views, and it has been used on issues such as drafting Uber regulations. 

https://info.vtaiwan.tw/

https://pol.is/home

https://congress.crowd.law/case-vtaiwan.html

On join.gov.tw, Taiwan’s citizens can file petitions, and when they gather 5,000 signatures, ministries hold face-to-face discussions about them. 

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9530852

Former digital minister, Audrey Tang  

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2024/05/22/audrey-tang-learning-from-taiwans-digital-civic-experimentation/

Citizen Tech NGOs: g0v (gov-zero): The civic tech community in Taiwan that collaborates with the government to create open-source tools for transparency and citizen participation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G0v

ieet.org/white-papers

www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/202407/what-if-artificial-intelligence-replaces-human-therapists

www.npr.org/transcripts/1247296788

Nir and J. talk about facial recognition. Topics covered include considerations of bias, the role of privacy, and whether facial recognition is substantially different from other identification technologies. 

“Halt the use of facial-recognition technology until it is regulated" by Kate Crawford

On Liberty by John Stuart Mills 

The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution by C.P. Snow

Hosted by James Hughes and Nir Eisikovits Produced by Jake Burley Music by Jake Burley

Nir and J. talk about the prospects for tech policy under Trump's second term. They discuss the new administration's attitudes toward content moderation, what the next four years mean for Artificial Intelligence, and Elon Musk's potential influence on tech policy moving forward. 

Credits: Hosted by James Hughes and Nir Eisikovits Produced by Jake Burley Music by Jake Burley

Nir and J. discuss ethical issues surrounding so-called super soldiers and human augmentation in warfare.

• Human Augmentation - The Dawn of a New Paradigm
• Can A.I. Be Blamed for a Teen’s Suicide?

Hosted by James Hughes and Nir Eisikovits Produced by Jake Burley Music by Jake Burley

In this episode, Nir and J. discuss whether machines can be moral. What does it take for something to be a moral patient or moral subject? Can morality be distilled down to a set of rules? Is the red-teaming and safety testing of large language models a way to teach machines morality? 

• Moral Machines by Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach

Hosted by James Hughes and Nir Eisikovits Produced by Jake Burley Music by Jake Burley

Prosthetic Gods: Artificial General Intelligence

In this episode of Prosthetic Gods, J. Hughes and Nir Eisikovits dive into artificial general intelligence (AGI), AI that has reached a human level of consciousness and common sense. Is AI currently a "philosophical zombie," mimicking human behavior without true awareness? Will AGIs be the perfect 24/7 slaves, replacing expensive humans in workplace? Would AGI be the beginning of AI evolving beyond human control? 

Also, check out this week’s Ethics in Action podcast conversation with philosopher Susan Schneider: https://ethics.podbean.com/e/ai-consciousness-and-the-future-mind-a-conversation-with-susan-schneider/

Hosted by: James Hughes and Nir Eisikovits Produced by: Jake Burley Music by: Jake Burley

J and Nir talk to Tal Hassner, formerly of Amazon and Meta, about Deep Fakes, AGI, and whether there is such a thing as a tech-proof job.

Find out more about Tal here: https://talhassner.github.io/home/ 

Hosted by James Hughes and Nir Eisikovits Produced by Jake Burley Music by Jake Burley