From The Archives: The Moral Challenges Posed By AI

Dr. Vukov, thanks so much for talking with us today.

Thanks so much for having me, Matthew.

I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, so I think just to get started, I kind of like to do a little bit of term definition.

It's a philosopher

that makes me happy.

Okay, good, good.

So I'm going to ask you a very important term definition, very big.

So please answer as short or as long as you want it to be.

You talk about staying human.

And we're going to talk about staying human.

I think we need to first establish what is being human.

Can you break down what you mean when you say staying human?

Yeah, I mean it in two senses.

So the first sense of staying human is having an understanding of who we are, as in what it means to be a human being.

And of course, there's rival views about what that looks like.

So some people might defend a view that says we're pure spirit.

Others might defend a view that says we're pure biological animals.

I defend a view in the book that says we're somewhere in between, that we're essentially embodied, but yet also in part immaterial.

But that's the first part of staying human is really in an era of artificial intelligence, making sure that we go forward with an idea of exactly who we are as human beings.

Then I think if we've done that work first, it will clarify a lot of the conversations down the road.

So that's the first aspect.

The second aspect is staying human in how we act.

So in how we act in response to each other and how we react to ourselves and understand ourselves, and then also in terms of our relationship with God.

So I think that there's sort of this, you could call it the internal, the inward looking dimension of staying human.