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Artifical Intelligence forces engineers to face the Big Questions
There has been so much happening at PCW Towers over the past couple of days that I have hardly had time to write anything up. But I should mention a wonderful afternoon yesterday at a Royal Academy of Engineering seminar called AI and IT: where engineering and philosophy meet.
The title says it all: engineers talking about philosophy. Of course, science as a whole has never really divorced the subject - it used to be called "natural philosophy". Darwin, in spite of himself, sent Christianity into a spin; cosmology found itself crashing into theology; but engineering was supposed to be about nuts, bolts, and applied mathematics.
Computing changed all that, and in my humble it has yet to have the impact it deserves on public discourse on the great questions about who and what we are. Darwinism, after a sensational start, took the best part of a century to filter through into the mainstream and then only with the help of brilliant evangelists like Richard Dawkins. I suspect that the implications of computing are similarly too broad and challenging for a single human generation to take in.
Anyway much of the afternoon was about the possibility (ot not) of machine consciousness, and I'll be writing more about it in our next edition.
Posted by Clive Akass on July 12, 2007 | Permalink
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