Research Seminar: Species Fair Comparison and the AI debate

Every claim about AI from AGI to the great human replacement of human labour and even the singularity rests on an assumption about ‘species fair comparison’. Machines cannot be said to be smarter than humans without some basis for fair comparison or what I call ‘comparative adequacy’. In this talk, drawing from research in psychology and comparative biology, I delve into the underlying methodological principle and show that in many, if not most, cases both research and philosophical arguments make unfair and misleading assumptions about how to compare humans to machines. The result is that neither AI doomers nor optimists have good reason for their philosophical positions.

All welcome.