How Humans Conceptualize Machines
A special issue of Philosophies (ISSN 2409-9287).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (25 April 2022) | Viewed by 13236
Special Issue Editors
Interests: philosophy of science; neural computation; cognitive science
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Never before have machines been so ubiquitous and pervasive as they are at present. With the advancement of artificial intelligence, machines are taking on increasingly diverse roles in human society, changing the landscape of our life. Intelligent vehicles cooperate with human drivers at various levels, including fully autonomous driving. Conversational assistants interact with people in providing troubleshooting guidance, recommending travel directions or shopping products. More and more news is created by machines, with the broader incorporation of automation in journalism.
There are robots taking on social roles and engaging in daily activities such as education, elderly assistance, and health care. Others serve as sex robots, and it is not clear whether their presence in the contemporary scene can be considered as an opportunity for the freedom of sex workers or a threat to human dignity (Kathleen Richardson).
The huge artificial intelligence market has given birth to a number of new research areas, in the effort to foster the acceptance of machines, and to improve the interaction experience of humans with machines. This research intersects disciplines from engineering, psychology, computer science, economy, and sociology. There is, however, a fundamental issue that boils down all of the studies about humans’ interaction with machines: the understanding of how humans conceptualize machines.
This sort of investigation involves crucial aspects of how in general humans construct concepts of minds with which they interact, therefore, it pertains first and foremost to philosophy of mind and cognitive science. It is especially important to assess the evolution of the mental image of machines due to the new artificial intelligence. People may now attribute machines with properties such as conscious experience and a kind of moral status. Such attributes might in turn affect the evolution of social attitude towards machines.
In the past, a prevailing attitude towards machines, developed in mid-eighteenth-century England and later in United States, was of machines as slaves, replacing the labor of men in the harshest conditions. In the same period, a group, called the Luddites, raged against machines, and they did everything they could to resist them. Intellectual technophobic caveats abound in modernist thinking, from Spengler to Heidegger and Benjamin. On the opposite side, at the beginning of the past century the Italian Futurist movement promoted a radical machine culture. Today too there are supporters of technophilia and technophobia; within the former there are the singularists, posthumanists, and transhumanists. Probably, the prevailing conceptualization of machines by lay people is yet to be discovered.
We welcome papers exploring all aspects that contribute to answering the question of how humans conceptualize machines.
Dr. Alessio Plebe
Prof. Dr. Pietro Perconti
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- trust in automation
- artificial intelligence
- machine consciousness
- machine morality
- artificial intelligence ethics
- social robotics
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