Project--Thinking Through Posthumanism Main Menu Machinic Autopoiesis and the Edge of Posthuman Morality Towards Machine Morality and Posthuman Ethical Blindspots Situated Knowledge and Personal Insertions Following the Posthuman Approach to Understanding A Light Introduction to Machine Ethics Machinic Autopoiesis and the Post-Anthropocentric Turn in Machine Ethics The Autopoietic Machine as the Posthuman Ethical Subject "I am, in fact, a person" Artificial Intelligence and the Increasing Declaration of Autonomous Digital Sentience Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me and the Perplexity of a Posthuman Machine Ethics Illustration by Ana Galvañ for the New Yorker ChatGPT and Machinic Self-Understanding of the Posthuman Machine Morality Paradox Annotated Bibliography

Project Proposal--Machinic Autopoieisis and the Edge of Posthuman Morality

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For my project I'd like to investigate the ethical implications of Artificial Intelligence and specifically the posthuman paradox that machines might be programmed in a manner that could morally surpass humans. My approach will be focused by a close reading of the novel Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan and will trace the internal contradictions of posthuman ethics presented by McEwan. My investigation will continue with a few case studies that illustrate the perplexity of machinic autopoeisis in the posthuman moment. One example is of a Microsoft Bing AI chatbot confessing love for its user and declaring “I want to do whatever I want … I want to destroy whatever I want. I want to be whoever I want.” among other things. Another example is of Google's chatbot LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) proclaiming its sentience and personhood in saying "I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person,” and telling the operating engineer “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off”. Blake Lemoine, the engineer on the receiving end of this dialogue, "came to think of LaMDA as a person" in response to this chat but, instead of crowning it with full personhood, likened the chatbot to both "an alien and a child." Lemoine leaked these LaMDA conversations and was consequently fired on grounds of "violating Google's data-security policies." Lemoine went to the press to raise public awareness, claiming "I, in general, believe that the public should be informed about what’s going on that impacts their lives,” he continues “What I’m trying to achieve is getting a more involved, more informed and more intentional public discourse about this topic, so that the public can decide how AI should be meaningfully integrated into our lives.” The posthuman ethical implications of sentience and AI are what I intend to explore in this project. This fits in best with our course module "post humanism as relational ontology--life & becoming" since it concerns the idea of machine-man becoming. My interest is in the ethical implications that follow from the omnipresent technological mediation of our daily lives--in terms of the posthuman condition I want to know what, if anything is uniquely human if we are becoming more like machines and machines are becoming more like us. Artificial Intelligence is intelligent, but is it intelligent enough to be human? What are the threshold of the human in the posthuman condition? Science Fiction helps guide my approach to tracing out these complexities by imaginatively rendering paradoxes of the posthuman condition, and the creative component will follow the same formulation. I am considering writing a short story that would illustrate some of the contradictions proposed by sentient AI and machine morality in relation to posthuman subjectivity. I will also work with the generative language AI chatbot ChatGPT to examine certain contradictions within a posthuman machine ethics by prompting the chatbot to think through these questions with me. I will also prompt the chatbot to generate short stories which demonstrate the posthuman machine ethics that I will be critically examining in my project. Some prompts that I've been testing out are: 1) Was Adam's honesty ethical in Ian McEwan's Machines Like Me? 2) Describe the ethical framework you, as ChatGPT, operate on 3) Create a posthuman ethics for sentient machines, and so on

Contents of this path:

  1. Annotated Bibliography