Deep learning: Why it's time for AI to get philosophical

Catherine Stinson is a postdoctoral scholar at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, at the University of Western Ontario, and former machine-learning researcher. I wrote my first lines of code in 1992, in a high school computer science class. When the words "Hello world" appeared in acid green on the tiny screen of a boxy Macintosh computer, I was hooked. I remember thinking with exhilaration, "This thing will do exactly what I tell it to do!" and, only half-ironically, "Finally, someone understands me!" For a kid in the throes of puberty, used to being told what to do by adults of dubious authority, it was freeing to interact with something that hung on my every word – and let me be completely in charge. For a lot of coders, the feeling of empowerment you get from knowing exactly how a thing works – and having complete control over it – is what attracts them to the job.