As Sage Cammers-Goodwin highlights in the conversation below, isn't it curious that those who are seen to fulfil the manufactured tech ideal of intelligence are “so denuded of emotion or caring”? We seem to take it for granted that the most socially and politically prized forms of intelligence lack “those characteristics, such as attentiveness and concern for others, that we routinely connect with being a good human being”. What, then, if the much-hyped AI technologies that are promised to be inveigling themselves into ever more intimate corners of our lives are simply an inorganic extension of this highly limited and gendered fantasy of intellectual life as pure information processing? This conversation considers these questions and many more besides, with the aim of clarifying the ethical and societal impact of AI.

Stephen Cave is Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. His research is mostly in the philosophy of technology, with a focus on the ethics of AI/robotics and the philosophy of (im) mortality.

Sage Cammers-Goodwin is a PhD candidate at the University of Twente. Her research bridges philosophy and computer science, focusing on smart cities, and stakeholder interests and interactions in implementing “smart” enhancements to cities.

Sage Cammers-Goodwin (SC-G): What do you consider to be the main problem with intelligence, or the history of intelligence, that introduces it as a matter of philosophical concern? Stephen Cave (SC): Intelligence is such a part of our everyday discourse. This is reflected in assumptions that some people are more intelligent than others, that this matters for what they can or should do, and that this is measurable. But these ideas are quite new. The term “intelligence” wasn't widely used in English until the end of the nineteenth century, and it really rose to prominence with intelligence testing from the start of the twentieth century. It quickly became hugely important because it was useful to a wide range of other political and economic projects. When the term “AI” was coined back in 1955, it was very much trying to ride that particular wave.

So the first thing to emphasize is the need to contextualize and problematize the concept of intelligence. Instead of asking, “What does this concept mean?”