A new TV show fronted by Jimmy Carr will destroy artworks from artists ranging from Picasso to Hitler. Is this a bad thing? We look at the arguments for and against destroying art for entertainment. (more...)

A sample of AI art generated by Stable Diffusion. Is AI generated art different from human art, and is it art at all? (more...)

Today, we are confronted with the need to weigh free speech against other values like inclusivity, respect and tolerance. We look at the arguments of philosopher Ronald Dworkin in defence of free speech. (more...)

I tried out Jasper AI, a computer program that generates natural language text. It turns out that it can create near-perfect output that would easily pass for a human-written undergraduate philosophy paper. (more...)

People as well as large-scale events, for example the Durch Tulip Mania or the technology crash in the early 2000s, are sometimes said to be irrational. But what exactly do we mean by that? (more...)

Adam Davidson describes the “Passion Economy” in a book released in 2020. This article shows why Davidson’s proposal is not a sustainable solution to fix our current relationship with work. (more...)

How can we tell whether an AI program “thinks” or “feels”? In the recent debate of Blake Lemoine’s claims about LaMDA, a functionalist approach can help us understand machine consciousness and feelings. (more...)

Disclaimer: This is an article about the definition of mental health. It is not meant and should not be used as advice on how to treat mental health problems. (more...)

The main epistemic concern in the light of the potential ubiquity of deepfakes is not that we are going to be massively deceived. Global distrust and not global deception could be the ultimate consequence of deepfakes. (more...)

Since governments are charged with pursuing the popular well-being and not state power or prosperity, wars of aggression are illegitimate. - David Cockayne on how classic Confucianism would see wars. (more...)

In 1964, Bertrand Russell wrote that the philosopher’s duty was now to forget philosophy and to study “the probable effects of a nuclear war.” (more...)

Are we driving ourselves insane? And have we been doing so for over a hundred years? To understand this, we need to understand how we came to think of ourselves as depressed. (more...)

What exactly do we mean when we say that “nothing matters”? More than sixty years ago, the British philosopher Richard Mervyn Hare attempted to answer this question in an early essay. (more...)

What if the Second World War had turned out differnetly? This article explains why counterfactuals and alternative histories can be misleading. (more...)

For the first time in history, an AI called DABUS has been granted a patent in South Africa. This article analyses the metaphysics of attributing inventions to non-human agents. (more...)

In a book published in 2008, R. H. Thaler and C. R. Sunstein define nudges as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way.” (more...)

Computers have a long history of being associated with evilness. Machine minds without emotions suggest cruelty, unflinching execution of inhuman orders. (more...)

The creation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds great promise, but with it also comes existential risk. (more...)

Can artificial intelligence discover new laws of physics? Possibly. An article in Technology Review suggests that data from a swinging pendulum experiment allowed a neural network to discover some of the laws of motion. (more...)

Luddism is the thesis that technology must serve human life and that often the use of technologies does not make for better or happier societies. (more...)

Why is it so difficult to make predictions about society? The problem is not the complexity of the task, but the concepts we use to think about the world. (more...)

In her book “Epicurean Simplicity,” author and activist Stephanie Mills analyses what is wrong with our modern way of life. (more...)

A cashless society seems convenient, but it has severe drawbacks, especially for the least privileged in society. (more...)

Can two people’s experiences and outlooks on life be so different that meaningful communication between them is impossible? Recent events suggest so. (more...)

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From ancient China and the European Middle Ages, to zombies, Frankenstein’s monster and HAL 9000, our literary tradition is full of robots – sometimes helpful, sometimes threatening, and always questioning what it really means to be human. (more...)

Being lazy, far from being something good, would be, for Aristotle, a total failure of a human being and the best way for someone to make sure that they will never reach true happiness. (more...)

The Turing Test wanted to provide a way to judge whether computers are intelligent, but pretending to be human in a chat is not the same as being intelligent. (more...)

Technology, at least in the way that it is deployed in capitalism contradicts the essential simplicity of the ideal Epicurean life. (more...)

Social media affect our society in many ways: addiction, democracy, the decline of journalism, privacy, surveillance, and effects on friendships. (more...)

Whistleblowing might be wrong because it violates one’s obligations to one’s friends, relatives, co-workers or superiors. (more...)

Economist Daniel Kahneman studied the effects of memory on our perception of past experiences. He distinguishes experienced from remembered happiness. (more...)

Eating small quantities of meat that was grown in a sustainable way might be morally justifiable, while large-scale animal farming is probably morally wrong. (more...)

Love is a very complex phenomenon that encompasses sex, friendship, self-love and selflessness, as well as God’s love in many religious traditions. (more...)