I’ll be presenting a keynote lecture at Clemson University’s Law and Society Symposium next week. The Symposium is organized around legal and philosophical questions raised by Artificial Intelligence (AI). My keynote is entitled “What Is Intelligence For?” This area moves quickly, but a tentative abstract of my remarks is as follows:
Artificial intelligence technologies are today capable of generating artifacts comparable to those we would previously have expected could only be produced through the skilled intellectual labor of human beings, from college essays to mathematical proofs to legal briefs to pop music. Our society is currently divided as to whether and in what circumstances they should be permitted to do so, and how if at all they might be prevented from doing so. The reasons generally given for opposition to artificial intelligence—concerns over the allegedly poor quality of AI-generated artifacts, concerns about labor competition, concerns about misappropriation of the labor that went into producing the materials AI systems have been trained on—are well rehearsed. I wish to focus on a different question: why we do, or should, value human intellectual labor. If generative AI technologies provide us with artifacts at least comparable to those produced by such labor (or if they soon shall), and if they do so in a way that fairly compensates the authors of their training data and provides adequate material resources to human beings whose labor-market value has been damaged by the productivity gains of artificial intelligence, would we still have any basis to object to them? I think there are areas where we might, and areas where we might not. The distinction depends on a lesser-invoked but increasingly salient allegation concerning AI technologies: that their use reduces the user’s capacity to engage in intellectual labor. The question that arises in areas like education, mathematics, law, and the arts, is whether we should care if this were indeed the case. In each of these areas, there are arguments that we should, and arguments that we should not. Which of these arguments we find persuasive will turn on what we think human intellectual labor is for—what its purpose or value is—and thus AI technologies thus require us to confront that question directly.
The symposium is free and open to the public, and the full program should be very interesting. Registration is encouraged for those who plan to attend. If you are in the area, I hope I’ll see you there.
