Does hope for humanity rely on philosophy?

The dawn of the era of powerful artificial intelligence, which is upon us, is going to

raise profound challenges for the love ethic, and it's also going to be an incredible opportunity

for the love ethic. The love ethic says to love your neighbor with the same intensity with which you love yourself

It says that there is something incredibly important and unique about being a human person

about having human dignity, the way that humans think and behave, which has moral significance, which software will never have

How are we going to explain the basis of that dignity, the basis of that significance

when we have software that is computationally far more powerful than we are

when we have software that's far better at reasoning than we are, we are going to stop having any temptation, I think, to measure human dignity

in terms of productivity or logical capacity or our ability to reason according to certain kinds of formal rules

because software is now better at that than we are. We're going to have to locate dignity in something even more fundamental

And proponents of the love ethic I think will emerge as some of the most powerful voices about what gives our lives value if it not something that software can do Another area where the love ethic is going to become incredibly important is that we have noticed in the last 25 years with the dawn of the internet era and the dawn of social media that our technology has the

capacity to make us really unloving, make us very insular, very lonely, very

fractured. And I think we have every reason to believe as our technology

becomes more ubiquitous and more powerful, that this trend is only going to continue

I think the best hope that we have is with philosophy. When we went from handwritten

script to the printing press, when we went from local industries to the Industrial Revolution

these were also periods of incredible philosophical creativity. When humans were forced to rethink

maybe some lazy assumptions about what made our lives meaningful and what makes our society work

Those assumptions were challenged, and as a result of really leaning into the philosophical questions

we came up with even better ideas about why we're here, what fundamentally makes us human

and how we should rearrange our social lives. I think the coming dawn of the era of powerful artificial intelligence is going to be another occasion like this

and it will be an amazing opportunity to see a big leap forward in our ethical thinking about love

about what it means to organize our society around fundamentally human ethical principles