upcoming courses…

Phil 450: Philosophy of Emerging Technology

This course is an upper-level exploration of philosophical issues raised by recent and near-future technologies—including artificial intelligence, climate engineering, virtual reality, surveillance tech, gene editing, anti-aging treatments, and engineered viruses. We will consider how these are likely to affect human well-being and agency, evaluate various risks, and ask how we ourselves might help shape a better future in light of these developments.

Here are some the questions we will consider:

• How should we think about the potential role of artificial friends, therapists, assistants, physicians, lovers? In the near-term, how will AI affect our knowledge and reasoning ability?

• What guiding principles should we instill in AI agents? Do these differ from the principles that should guide humans?

• What would it take for artificial minds to be moral subjects? Could they become (phenomenally) conscious, and if so, how would we know?

• How might trends like emerging surveillance tech and shifting (or diminishing) labor markets affect our well-being and autonomy? What steps can we take to mitigate harm?

• Do emerging technologies subject us to catastrophic and even existential risks? If so, how important an issue is this, morally speaking? How much should we care about safeguarding the long-term future of humanity?

• What is the ethics of “interfering with nature” to (i) reduce climate change (geo-engineering); (ii) eliminate animal-vector human diseases (e.g. malaria); (iii) reduce suffering in animals

• Are there important moral distinctions between medical treatments that involve gene edits and those that don’t? What should our moral and legal response be to new treatments and also to new “elective enhancements”?

• Are we within sight of extending healthy life years for humans? What are the ethical, economic, and demographic considerations of treatments for aging itself?

Phil 360: Global Priorities

This course is about the world’s most important problems, and about what we can do to help (with our careers, time, and resources). We will focus primarily on three areas: (i) global health and poverty, (ii) animals and the environment, and (iii) the impact of emerging technologies.

Note: this course is highly interdisciplinary; it’s not just a philosophy course. 

Some of the more philosophical questions we will consider are:

• What are the world’s most important problems? How can we even compare the importance of global problems? 

• How should we weigh human goods like health, freedom, opportunity, and happiness? Do present people matter more, morally, than future people?

• How much do animals/species/ecosystems matter, and why? 

• Do individuals have a moral responsibility to try to make the world a better place, or just to avoid causing harm? If we do try, how might we be most effective?

To answer these questions, we need a wide and accurate grasp of the state of the world and its trends; and if we hope to have an impact, we need the ability to assess the effectiveness of possible interventions. For these reasons, we will draw heavily from development economics, international studies, global health studies, environmental science, and the emerging field of progress studies. 

Phil 183: Critical Reasoning

Reason better when deciding what to believe, and when deciding what to do. This course provides the tools you need, drawing from several areas: cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, logic, probability, and decision theory. We will consider empirical evidence about 'heuristics and biases’—spontaneous judgments that can be predictably irrational. And we will study what good deductive, causal, and probabilistic reasoning looks like. But the goal is entirely practical: to develop effective reasoning skills with clear applications in your personal and professional lives. Here are some questions we will examine:

• What kinds of mental processes are involved in reasoning?

• What’s the difference between intelligence and rationality?

• How do people tend to go wrong when they reason about probabilities?

• What makes a line of reasoning valid or strong?

• When can we infer causation from correlation?

• Why do people tend to become more certain of the views they started with?

• Are there strategies we can use to avoid common errors in reasoning?

• What is evidence, and how does it interact with our background knowledge?

• Why is there no simple recipe for the scientific method?

• How does our initial reaction to potential risk tend to be irrational?

The course is open to students from all areas of the University interested in improving their reasoning ability and their ability to construct and recognize compelling arguments. These skills may be helpful in a wide variety of university subjects and extra-academic pursuits. Here is the text we will use.

other courses I’ve taught…