Tomi Kokkonen

In this paper, we ask how ‘cognitive extenders’, based on AI technology, affect their users’ status as moral agents and the moral evaluation of their actions. We study how ‘AI-extenders’ can either enhance or diminish their users’ moral agency. On the one hand, they can broaden the scope of agential features and on the other hand, they can undermine the agent’s autonomy and lead to decreased responsibility. Our focus is on moral agency and responsibility of the AI-extended human being as a hybrid, coupled system. Assuming standard conditions for responsible agency, we will look at specific cases where the extender would make a difference to the agent’s moral status. The thought-experimental extenders we are dealing with are enabled by already existing technologies. The obvious motivation behind the exercise is that these devices might be useful for people suffering from psychiatric conditions complicating the expression of their moral agency. We analyze the moral status of AI-extended agents as coupled systems and argue that the functioning of an AI-extender can make a difference to an agent’s fitness to be held morally responsible. This should be considered in the responsible design and development of AI-extenders.

In God Emperor of Dune, Leto II explains to Moneo why people destroyed thinking machines in the Butlerian Jihad: "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments." The Orange Catholic Bible (OCB), the key religious text in the Dune universe, forbids the creation of machines that imitate human thinking: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind." The OCB focuses on human mental abilities – especially computation, reason, and logic – that have a status that machines should not emulate. In Frank Herbert's universe, divine imitation and creation are presented in conflicting ways: on the one hand, they are strictly prohibited, on the other, they are aspirations for key characters. Mentats replace machines by use of hard, cold, logical thinking and reasoning with machine‐like efficiency.

Tarkastelemme tässä artikkelissa, kuinka ihmisen psykologinen taipumus olemusajatteluun eli niin kutsuttu psykologinen essentialismi voisi näkyä argumentaatiossa. Esittelemme ensin psykologista tutkimusta aiheesta, minkä jälkeen tarkastelemme ilmiön merkitystä argumentaation ja sen tutkimuksen kannalta. Olemusajattelu näkyy julkilausumattomina taustaoletuksina, jotka kuitenkin vaikuttavat ihmisten tapaan tehdä päätelmiä ja rakentaa argumentteja. Argumentaation yhteydessä olemusajattelua tulee tarkastella taipumuksena tietynlaisiin piilopremisseihin. Lopuksi pohdimme, mitä merkitystä tällä voisi olla filosofian näkökulmasta.