When physicist Donald MacKay was invited to the 1956 Dartmouth workshop where AI was effectively born, he refused the invitation. MacKay’s moral and theological views, most especially his view that intelligence is not merely computational but must include meaning, will, and moral awareness, were sorely missed and remain a significant lacuna in AI research and development today. Arguably, many of the ethical problems facing AI developers today stem from a limited understanding of the human person.
This project will lay the foundations for a research network centered on multidisciplinary investigations of how to have AI that respects, supports, and engages with the full complexity of our humanity. In particular, values are a critical part of what it means to be human, but current AI development practices largely treat values in a minimal, behaviorist way. This project will thus begin to bring together a research network to ask how the complexities of our values and interests can inform and guide AI development through new frameworks, methods, and tools. More expansively, it will bring together scholars asking: What if the human mind is more than a mere computer?
The centerpiece of this project will be a pair of convenings—one smaller, one large-scale— that invite computer scientists into a collaborative dialogue with philosophers, social scientists, and theologians to work towards a future that integrates moral and philosophical perspectives about the nature of the human person into AI design, development, and use. This convening will be informed by a publicly-available landscape analysis of scholarly work at the intersection of AI and human values, and of AI and humanity. Ultimately, this project aims to catalyze and support the emergence of a research network that fundamentally rethinks the ways in which AI can, and more importantly should, support the full breadth of our humanity.
