What would it take for a machine to be present?
Fluent machines force an old question back into the open: is being present to the world the same as processing it?
Education after the machines can do the homework
If a machine can produce the essay, the essay was never the point. What schools were really teaching is now easier to see.
Judgement is not a calculation
We increasingly ask machines to decide. The word we use for good deciding, judgement, names something calculation alone does not supply.
Who answers when the machine did the work?
Responsibility used to follow the person who acted. When a system acts, it has to be assigned on purpose, or it disappears.
Four ways of asking whether a machine is conscious
Arguments about machine consciousness often fail because the two sides are answering different questions. Separating them helps.