What should the law do about AI?
From our UK edition
In the film Ex Machina, an American tech billionaire suspiciously reminiscent of Elon Musk creates a conscious machine. When he tells a collaborator that he is making history, the awed scientist replies that this is not the history of man. It is the history of gods. When the film came out in 2015, AI consciousness was safely relegated to science fiction. No longer. Last month the Economist devoted its cover to whether AIs could become conscious. Earlier this year, no less an authority on the history of men and gods than Pope Leo XIV pushed back hard on the idea, arguing in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas that AI does not undergo experiences, feel joy or pain, mature through relationships or know from within what love, work and friendship mean.
