The Prospect of a Humanitarian Artificial Intelligence - by Carlos Montemayor

Book Synopsis

In this open access book, Carlos Montemayor illuminates the development of artificial intelligence (AI) by examining our drive to live a dignified life.

He uses the notions of agency and attention to consider our pursuit of what is important. His method shows how the best way to guarantee value alignment between humans and potentially intelligent machines is through attention routines that satisfy similar needs. Setting out a theoretical framework for AI Montemayor acknowledges its legal, moral, and political implications and takes into account how epistemic agency differs from moral agency.

Through his insightful comparisons between human and animal intelligence, Montemayor makes it clear why adopting a need-based attention approach justifies a humanitarian framework. This is an urgent, timely argument for developing AI technologies based on international human rights agreements.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Carlos Montemayor and San Francisco State University.

Review Quotes

"The book by Montemayor is based on the solid ground of attention mechanisms, and it offers an urgent and original reflection on AI, the alignment of values, and the relevance of human rights in the development of AI systems." --Antonio Chella, Professor in Robotics, University of Palermo, Italy

"This book provides an important addition to current debates about the promise and perils of AGI. Montemayor's needs-and-attention-based approach to AGI highlights the importance of attention for genuine intelligence, and also gives us reasons to question whether non-autonomous systems will really be able to align with human values ... [A] ripe text for future engagement, and scholars will be rewarded for wrestling with the problems presented here." --AI & Society