While looking for something totally unrelated to AI, I came across this article on asharq alawsat - ‘the Leading Arabic Daily English edition’.
Can a Machine Issue Islamic Fatwas?
There isn’t enough detail in the article to glean anything specific about the programming of the Electronic Mufti, but it does raise some interesting issues in metaethics.
An Artificial Moral Authority?
January 28th, 2008 · 2 Comments
Tags: Teachable moments
2 responses so far ↓
1 abeavers // Feb 4, 2008 at 9:00 am
Along similar lines, Ronald Arkin of Georgia Tech has been busy engineering ethical behavior for automated weapons systems and other autonomous agents. To learn more, see this technical report.
2 danderso // Feb 5, 2008 at 1:39 pm
From the article, a student might come to the conclusion that the people have written a program that is designed to “read and understand” the words that are input into the system. If the program is any help, of course, it would also have to understand two paragraphs written by the same person, that might seem to contradict each other and produce its best attempt at some higher synthesis that does justice to both passages.
We know that there are no programs that do any such thing. This “AI” program, might be nothing more than a search engine that looks for key words or synonyms of key words and then produces as output the text surrounding those words.
It would sure be nice to know how the program works and what the authors of the program are actually claiming for it. As it is, the story is a curiosity but it isn’t clear how to have an intelligent conversation about it.
But maybe I’m missing its potential here. How might you use it in a discussion of metaethics?
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