Hans Moravec. Rise of the Robots.
Ray Kurzweil. The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine.
These two well-respected thinkers write in the same Scientific American special issue regarding their vision of robotics' and humanity's future. Read both of these articles first. Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil represent two of the deepest thinkers in the Singularity movement, which has won support from major corporations and even founded a university in Silicon Valley.
Questions:
1 Assumptions. Identify at least three major, unsupported assumptions made by each author that are foundational to their view of our singularity-driven future. To be precise, this means you are identifying and discussing a total of 6 assumptions.
2 For each of Moravec and Kurzweil, answer the following sub-questions:
a) How does the author deal with the ethical analysis of his imagined future in his article? If you see an ethical discussion, identify it and evaluate it.
b) If you were trying to model how the author likely thinks about ethical consequences regarding his work, what system or form of ethics do you believe the author would represent?
3 Conduct your own ethical evaluation of the hypothesized singularity (merger of human and robot forms), using either the consequentialist analysis or a character-based, Aristotelian analysis.