Artificial Intelligence and Ethics: An Exercise in the Moral Imagination

In a book written in 1964, God and Golem: Inc., Norbert Wiener predicted that the quest to construct computermodeled artificial intelligence (AI) would come to impinge directly upon some of our most widely and deeply held religious and ethical values. It is certainly true that the idea of mind as artifact, the idea of a humanly constructed artificial intelligence, forces us to confront our image of ourselves. In the theistic tradition of Judeo-Christian culture, a tradition that is, to a large extent: our "fate," we were created in the Such is the scenario envisaged by some of the classic science fiction of the past, Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus and the Capek brothers' R. U.R. (for Rossom's Universal Robots) being notable examples. Both seminal works share the view that Pamela McCorduck (1979) in her work Machines Who Think calls the "Hebraic" attitude toward the AI enterprise. In contrast to what she calls the "Hellenic" fascination with, and openness toward, AI, the Hebraic attitude has been one of fear and warning: "You shall not make for yourself a graven image..." I don't think that the basic outline of Franl%enstein needs to be recapitulated here, even if, The possibility of constructing a personal AI raises many ethical the fear that we might succeed, perhaps it is the fear that we might create a Frankenstein, or perhaps it is the fear that we might become eclipsed, in a strange Oedipal drama, by our own creation.