The Splintered Mind

I have a new paper in draft, this time with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong . We critique three recent books that address the moral standing of no...

I propose that we define "Artificial Intelligence" in the obvious way. An entity is an AI if it is both artificial (in the relev...

Doubters of AI consciousness -- such as neuroscientist Anil Seth in a forthcoming target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences -- someti...

Since 2014, I've compiled an annual ranking of science fiction and fantasy magazines, based on prominent awards nominations and "be...

I've been enjoying Nick Bostrom's 2024 book Deep Utopia . It's a wild series of structured speculations about meaning and purpo...

I'm traveling and not able to focus on my blog, so this week I thought I'd just share a section of my 2015 paper with Mara Garza de...

In Ned Beauman's 2023 novel Venomous Lumpsucker , the protagonist happens upon a breeding experiment in the open sea: a self-sustaining ...

New paper in draft! In 2015, Mara Garza and I briefly proposed what we called the Emotional Alignment Design Policy -- the idea that AI...

By a universal theory of consciousness , I mean a theory that would apply not just to humans but to all non-human animals, all possible AI s...

In the history of Earth, no one -- not even Mike Furr -- as far as I'm aware, has ever attempted to construct a serious, scientific mea...

Overall, on average, do societies improve morally over time? If maybe not in actual behavior, at least in expressed attitudes about right v...

Types and Degrees of Indistinguishability The Turing test (introduced by Alan Turing in a 1950 article ) treats linguistic indistinguisha...

Opening teaser: 1. A Beautifully Happy AI Servant. It's difficult not to adore Klara, the charmingly submissive and well-intention...