What Does It Mean to Be Human?

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Bethany Jenkins: Will our machines ever be conscious? And if so, will we have ethical or moral obligations to them? She says there's something going on inside of us that has created this desire to create artificial intelligence. Should we see this as us expressing our humanity and trying to create artificial AI? Or are we somehow overstepping the bounds of what it means to be human?Jenkins: Well, I think there is something that we create naturally as human beings and it's not artificial intelligence, but a language.

A.I. is no longer the stuff of science fiction. From Siri and Alexa to Chat GPT, our world is now inundated with artificial intelligence. One senses that it’s time to think more deeply about A.I. — its implications and its assumptions.

In this episode, you'll hear an excerpt from a Forum event at Iowa State University from March 2023. Josh Swamidass (WashU), a medical doctor and computer scientist, discusses the role of artificial intelligence today with Clark Wolf (Iowa State), a bioethicist and philosopher. Their conversation is moderatored by Alex Tuckness (Iowa State), a political science professor.

Watch the full Forum event here.
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