Perconti

Chat-GPT, humanoid robotics, and self-driving cars are just a few of the things that are changing our everyday lives. The rapid advancement of AI is eroding one by one all the cornerstones considered unique of human nature: language, consciousness, creativity, and moral responsibility. The book argues that the revolution we are facing is driven by Alan Turing’s ＂vision＂. This vision rests on the idea that intelligence is not an intrinsic property of human beings, but is a way in which matter is functionally organized and an attribute we are naturally inclined to ascribe to certain entities. For decades we have pretended that this idea does not have the corrosive power that it actually does, perhaps more so than the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. But now, given the achievements of new forms of computing based on deep learning and predictive coding, the most common intuitions can no longer avoid the dangerous Turing idea.

The book is intended for scholars, researchers, and readers intrigued by the intersections across disciplines interested in understanding the philosophical, ethical, and social implications of Artificial Intelligence and its impact on human nature.

Pietro Perconti is Full Professor in Philosophy of Mind at the Department of Cognitive Science, University of Messina, Italy. His research interests include social cognition, consciousness, and the social role of cognitive science. In the past, his research areas also cover history of the Western philosophy, in particular German classical age. Perconti is the author of over 100 publications, including nine books. The first book is Kantian Linguistics: Theories of mental representation and the linguistic transformation of Kantism (Nodus, Munster, 1999): it provides a seminal perspective on Kant’s account on language. The latest one, The Future of the Artificial Mind (with A. Plebe), provides an outline of what the artificial mind is now and the social impact it might have in the future. He co-founded the ICCS, International Center for Consciousness Studies (hardproblem.it).

Alessio Plebe received a degree in Electronic Engineering in 1981 from the University of Rome, Italy and a PhD degree in Philosophy of Language from the University of Palermo, Italy in 2004. He is Full Professor in Philosophy of Science at the Department of Cognitive Science of the University of Messina. His main research areas are neural computation, its epistemology, and its explanatory power for several cognitive functions. He has developed realistic neural models of visual object recognition, early language acquisition, and moral behaviour. Currently, he is researching the rise of deep learning, its causes and its impact on philosophy and cognitive science. An updated picture of what artificial intelligence is becoming nowadays in the light of deep learning is in his recent book, authored with Pietro Perconti, The Future of the Artificial Mind.