Many people think that academic philosophy is irrelevant to the real world. But it has increasingly important applications. Here’s my list of some of the really interesting ones.
Here’s hoping philosophers will make further progress on some of these!
1. The Trolley Problem: self-driving cars will be put in situations where there is a choice between sacrificing the passenger to save two pedestrians. Or they might have to choose between killing a 5-year-old pedestrian vs. killing a 70-year-old one.
2. The Hard Problem of Consciousness: every year, >100 billion mammals, birds, and fish live seemingly miserable lives on factory farms while ~1 trillion insects are raised yearly for food/animal feed. To what extent can insects/sardines/tuna/chickens/cows/pigs experience suffering?
3. Designing Utopia: if humanity survives long enough, and if technology grows exponentially in the long term, someday, we should have the technology to create something close to a paradise on earth. But what kind of paradise would we actually WANT to create? What should we be aiming for?
4. The Teletransporter: one-day technology may make it possible to upload or simulate a human brain on a computer. Cryonics contracts even let you specify if you would want this done to your frozen brain if/when it becomes feasible. But is that upload/simulation really YOU?
5. Uncertainty Uncertainties: some approaches to doing good allow expected value calculations from studies. Other ways require speculative arguments about the future. If, in both cases, we estimate a 10% chance of success, are these “10%”s equally good, even though one is much more uncertain?
6. Gender Disambiguation: there’s a battle over what precisely determines gender. Is it determined by your belief of what your gender is, a qualia of internally feeling like you are a specific gender, your soul (or some other non-physical property), your genes, your body, your gametes, your preferred social role, your presentation, your brain, the name we give to a choice each person makes, another permanent trait, another mutable trait, a cluster concept ambiguously referring to dozens of correlated traits, a meaningless concept, or something else? Maybe philosophers can at least narrow down this list of potential definitions by identifying that some are internally contradictory, incoherent, or at odds with what most people are trying to refer to.
7. The Nature of Intelligence: some think there’s an important sort of “intelligence” humans have that neural nets could never have (no matter how big, no matter how much data they were trained on). If so, what is the nature of this “intelligence”? If not, what are the implications for us, philosophy, and the future of humanity?
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This piece was first written on August 10, 2021, and first appeared on this site on March 5, 2023.
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