Hume’s guillotine and intelligent technologies

Abstract

Emerging intelligent society shall change the way people are organised around their work and consequently also as a society. One approach to investigating intelligent systems and their social influence is information processing. Intelligence is information processing. However, factual and ethical information are different. Facts concern true vs. false, while ethics is about what should be done. David Hume recognised a fundamental problem in this respect, which is that facts can be used to derive values. His answer was negative, which is critical for developing intelligent ethical technologies. Hume’s problem is not crucial when values can be assigned to technologies, i.e. weak ethical artificial intelligence (AI), but it is hard when we speak of strong ethical AI, which should generate values from facts. However, this paper argues that Hume’s aporia is grounded on a mistaken juxtaposition of emotions and cognition. In the human mind, all experiences are based on the cooperation of emotions and cognitions. Therefore, Hume’s guillotine is not a real obstacle, but it is possible to use stronger forms of ethical AI to develop new ethics for intelligent society.