MOUNT PLEASANT, MI — Matthew Katz knows you might be worried about “The Terminator.”
The Central Michigan University philosophy professor, though, also wants you to consider whether an android — a Terminator or something with less sinister intent — could one day “worry” about you.
Katz’s academic research explores the philosophical side of artificial intelligence, asking questions that humans may face as digital programs grow more intelligent and perform more functions in society.
Questions such as: What if artificial intelligence becomes self-aware? What are the ethical implications for people who interact with these human-like robots? Is it forced labor to task a “self-aware” A.I. to perform work it does not want to perform? And what does the emergence of human-created intelligent beings reveal about the nature of life?
The 52-year-old educator poses queries such as these to philosophy students at his Mount Pleasant-based university. In fact, earlier this academic calendar, he wrapped up a three-year Honors Program class exclusively dedicated to exploring philosophical issues tied to artificial intelligence.
When Katz imagined the Honors Program initiative, he didn’t predict how quickly its focus would become relevant to modern advances in technology. The first classes kicked off the same year the rest of the planet was introduced to ChatGPT, the generative artificial intelligence chatbot that supercharged A.I. capabilities beginning in 2022.
“That’s when the whole world exploded with news about artificial intelligence,” Katz said. “I didn’t expect the sort of scale at which people would start to use A.I. in their day-to-day lives. That’s been a surprise, just how fast it’s taken off.”
In his Honors Program curriculum — as well as in other philosophy classes Katz leads — the professor presents his students with questions that may challenge them to consider the ethics of using the A.I. tools to complete their assignments.
“If I assign a paper and the assignment is turned in and it’s been written by ChatGPT or a similar program, I would think of that as academic dishonesty,” the professor said.
But, if a student is writing a paper and uses Grammarly — an A.I.-powered writing assistance program — to eliminate grammatical errors from a student-authored essay, would that be acceptable to a teacher grading the paper?
For the record, since Katz teaches philosophy classes that task students with thought experiments rather than English classes that test their skill with sentence structuring, he said he has no problem with his pupils asking digital programs for a grammar boost.
“I don’t want to send our students out unequipped for the workforce of the 21st century,” Katz said of global industries increasingly adopting A.I. aid into work production.
Katz also challenges students to consider how they may behave toward artificial intelligence if one day they live alongside a digital program that is indistinguishable from a person. It’s a question they tackle when reading the Katz-assigned essay, “Robots and Minds,” by American philosopher William Lycan.
“His paper thinks into the future and asks, ‘If there were a robot that looked and behaved like a human being — they clean their driveway, they mow their lawn, they argue with their kids — would that creature be conscious or, as Lycan puts it, would it be ‘a mindless walking hardware store that only appeared (human)?’,” Katz said. “Like the Terminator, but with no murders.”
Yes, Katz is keen on artificial references in pop culture. He knows some students might better connect with an assignment if they can relate it to films such as the 1984 James Cameron-directed dystopian thriller about killer A.I. or literature such as “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” the 1968 Phillip K. Dick novel that portrays android antagonists as more human than its human protagonist.
To capture the attention of students, Katz weaves more modern pop culture references into his coursework. In some classes, he’s screened the 2014 sci-fi thriller, “Ex Machina,” which tackles philosophical questions that explore the blurry line separating humanity from “conscious” machinery.
“Students know how to use (artificial intelligence), but they don’t necessarily know what’s going on in the insides,” Katz said. “As we get into these ethical issues, (students) had a good time thinking about issues they may have not considered before.”
And those thoughts will become more relevant as humans continue finding new ways to engage artificial intelligence, and as A.I. continues to evolve, Katz said.
“I’ll be doing research on it, and that will be the same for many philosophers around the country,” he said. “There will be more conferences on it. It’s growing in interest just as the technology is growing in availability.”
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