Artificial Intelligence Liberalism: Questions Small and Big

Current ethical discourse on AI ethics is too narrow. The argument divides into three parts. Part one offers a simplified overview that samples recent work by Mark Coeckelbergh, one of the few philosophers who properly seeks to combine ethics and politics. Part two pushes for granting existential risk a more prominent, limit situation role in AI ethical-political discourse, and call attention to the post-World War II emergence of concerns about prospective potentials for global technogenic catastrophies. Part three pays tribute to Toby Ord’s effort to construct the kind of bridge that I advocate, but then questions whether the liberalist political philosophical basis on which it rests. Part four calls out liberalism as enabling AI in ways that undermine efforts to subject it to proper ethical-political judgment and regulation.