As you already know, we went to the second Juvet A.I. Retreat, back in September. If you want to hear several of us talk about what we got up to at the then you’re in luck because here are several conversations conducted by Ben Byford of the Machine Ethics Podcast.
I am deeply grateful to Ben Byford for asking me to sit down and talk about this with him. I talk a great deal, and am surprisingly able to (cogently?) get on almost all of my bullshit—technology and magic and the occult, nonhuman personhood, the sham of gender and race and other social constructions of expected lived categories, the invisible architecture of bias, neurodiversity, and philosophy of mind—in a rather short window of time.
So that’s definitely something…
This is also one of the more theory-heavy conversations I’ve had in recent years, because the people with whom I was talking all had an overarching sense of agreement on the terms we were using, and the field in which we were having this discussion. A broad agreement that machine intelligence won’t be human intelligence and that that’s okay; a basic understanding that we’ll need to specifically address, engage, and heed the reportage of marginalized communities in order to do this work anything like well; a recognition that our definitions of “intelligence” are rather nebulous and problematic; and even some general agreement that using the term “artificial” isn’t necessarily the best, for a variety of reasons.
So, since all that was already done, we were able to think about things like phenomenology and personhood and moral grounding and metaethics and values and how the social, political, personal, technological, visceral, philosophical, valuative, and aesthetic all inform and create each other.
If you want more of this conversation, you can find the full conversation between me and Ben here:
[Direct Link to Mp3]
There’s a bit at the end where I talk about reducing the lag time between a new scenario that shocks and scares us and our reacting to in a agile rather than reductive way, that gets at a lot of what’s been on my mind, recently.
Additionally, whenever I find out that a transcription is available, I will let you know.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these conversations. I definitely enjoyed having and listening to them.
Until Next Time.