Artificial Intelligent Persons: A Case for Philosophical Anthropology

Abstract

Laudable accomplishments have been made in the recent past in the biological sciences. One of such breakthroughs common to our visual conceptual imaginations revolve around issues bordering on genetic engineering. Particularly important here is the issue of creating a better and even more efficient human beings endowed with unimaginable versatility and thereby creating/producing/manufacturing higher qualitied human beings by tinkering their genetic constitution and so improve their biological system. However, still with a deeper thirst for higher and more dramatic aspirations, the human mind conceives and brings into fruition a certain intention of a post-biological life, whereby robots or similar objects are infused with artificial intelligence. The goal here is an inauguration of a post-biological life, a spatio-cosmic population of seemingly intelligent creatures without corporeality with an emphatic note of depopulation of natural intelligence, that is, a depopulation of the human beings which some people wrongly consider to be less intelligent than these manufactured robotic creatures. One therefore wonders that even with the apparent exhibition of multivariant supersonic qualities of efficiency and terrific manifestation of intelligence in the execution of tasks, whether these robotic intelligent creatures can be conceived and even be addressed as persons or whether they are still deficient in the possession of the defining qualities characteristic of the human person and attributable to him. It is the intention of this paper to delve into this anthropological concern and so lend a voice in resolving the tensions in-between.