8 texts
Library
The texts one should have read, or at least understood, to think about artificial intelligence. Each in a few lines: what it says, and why to read it now.
4th c. BCE
Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI
Aristotle
There are several ways of being intelligent, and the most important for living — practical wisdom — is neither science nor cleverness.
1942
“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies”
Simone Weil
The real purpose of study is not to accumulate knowledge but to train attention — the most precious faculty, towards problems and towards people alike.
1950
“Computing Machinery and Intelligence”
Alan Turing
Rather than asking whether machines think, let us ask whether they could behave, in writing, indistinguishably from a human.
1974
“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
Thomas Nagel
A being is conscious if there is something it is like to be it — and that subjective point of view resists every objective description.
1979
The Imperative of Responsibility
Hans Jonas
When technical power reaches into the distant future, ethics must change scale: we become responsible for what we will never see.
1980
“Minds, Brains, and Programs”
John Searle
Manipulating symbols correctly is not enough to understand what they mean: syntax is not semantics.
1995
“Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”
David Chalmers
Explaining every function of the brain will leave one question untouched: why are they accompanied by lived experience?
2014
Superintelligence
Nick Bostrom
An intelligence far superior to ours is possible, perhaps near, and controlling it could be the most important — and most difficult — problem humanity has ever had to solve.