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Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, Science, Peril, and Promise
James Carroll
Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence have surprised many, and have led to an intense discussion about issues surrounding their safety and ethical use. In this lecture we will try to address some of the philosophical questions surrounding AI, such as “Can computers think?”, “Do they understand?”, “WHAT do they understand?”, “Are they conscious?”, and “What are the true dangers they pose?” We will also discuss some of the potential religious implications such as “The Simulation Hypothesis”, and “The New God Argument”, and we will address some of the questions raised by philosophical thought experiments including “Mary’s Room”, “The Chinese Room” and the “Neural Substitution Argument”.
James Carroll received a PhD in Computer Science with an emphasis on Artificial Intelligence and a minor in Ancient Near Eastern History in 2010 from Brigham Young University. His dissertation was on the Statistics of Machine Learning, and the Computer Assisted annotation of ancient religious texts. As a graduate student he taught classes on Artificial Intelligence, Isaiah, The Book of Mormon, and The Pearl of Great Price in the Ancient Scripture Department. After graduation he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, first as a post doc, and then as a scientist, where he worked primarily on radiography. He is currently researching the application of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for the analysis of Radiographic Image data. He currently attends the Unitarian Universalist Church of Los Alamos, where he teaches Adult Religious Education classes on comparative religion and the Old Testament. His classes are available online at: https://www.youtube.com/@jlc46
