Subjectivity bias and AI
Here's an abstract of a paper I'm proposing for this year's Society for Philosophy and Psychology conference. It pulls together and extends some of my thoughts from earlier blog posts. Subjectivity Bias and the Evaluation of Artificial Intelligence Many critiques of artificial intelligence claim that its apparent capacities are "not real." It's said that AI intelligence is not real intelligence, AI understanding not real understanding, AI emotions not real emotions, and AI companions not real companions. This paper examines such claims and argues that they often rely on an unexamined subjectivity bias: the tendency to treat human subjective experience as a prerequisite for recognizing psychological capacities. One sense of “not real” appeals to the fact that AI systems are machine constructions rather than biological organisms. But the observation is largely redundant for explicitly artificial capabilities. If humans are understood as physical systems produc...