Reflections on and prospects of artificial intelligence:From metaphysical and physical perspectives

Dingcheng Ren

Shanxi University,China

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a booming academic field with a wide range of application areas and prospects.Many people,including scientists,technologists,engineers,entrepreneurs and even social managers and scholars of humanities and social science,have shown a strong interest and great enthusiasm for AI-related topics,which has become an important phenomenon of contemporary scientific culture.There is a large collection of documents reflecting on and forecasting the development of AI from different angles.

Articles in this special issue,contributed by authors from Shanxi University,reflect the authors’distinctive and authentic thoughts,aiming to add something new to the database of AI-related documents.

Modern science,born during the Renaissance,is the most powerful culture that has transformed humanity and its society.Theoretically,that power comes mainly from science itself,which pursues objective and novel knowledge,is based on solid evidence and rigorous logic and has an inherent self-correcting mechanism.The power of science is manifested in its exclusion of the personal factors of knowledge producers.Through de-subjectivity,knowledge becomes value free intheprocessof refinement,sothat everyone has to accept it.Repeated experiments,peer criticism and sentences in the passive voice are all manifestations of de-valuing and de-subjectivity.Thagard(1989)says that scientific cognition is a kind of‘cold cognition’ of the scientific community without the influence of emotions,feelings and other factors.However,the results of numerous case studies in the contemporary sociology of scientific knowledge have revealed the presence of gender,class and national interests in the formation of scientific knowledge and even in scientific knowledge itself.Science is not something that is formed in the body and then detached from it.

AI,a machine intelligence created by human beings,is a product of science that seems to have nothing to do with the human body,but cannot be separated from it.On the one hand,the hardware and software of AI are created by humans,who have bodies;on the other hand,AI is first and foremost enabled by injecting the intelligence contained in human bodies into machines,before the self-evolution of AI is made possible.Moreover,AI can be imagined only with the simulation of embodied intelligence.Based on this,Zhenhua Zhou,Jianhua Xie and Jing Wang have proposed two possibilities for the future development of machine intelligence by comparing embodied intelligence with current machine intelligence.

Zhou argues that emotional thinking is the foundation for AI consciousness,no matter whether the consciousness is scientific or non-scientific.In his view,AI that is close to reaching the level of human consciousness will become possible only when it develops human-like abilities and behaviours of emotional expression.

Xie observes that the moral status of future AI depends on the development of its consciousness,which will also determine the future relationship between humans and AI.In his opinion,current AI does not have moral status but may acquire the same moral status as humans in the future.

By contrast,Jing Wang has a negative view,arguing that AI cannot have the same understanding as humans because it lacks the ability of selfreflection,the fore-structure of human understanding and a sense of history,all of which are unique to human intelligence.

AI is being widely used.Its wide range of applications possibly indicates the formation of an intelligent society.In this process,on the one hand,the strengths of AI must be put into good use to push for the advance of social production and social progress,and,on the other hand,it is necessary to anticipate its possible negative effects and propose forward-looking ideas and principles to bring them under control.The papers by Tao Deng and Hongxia Hou are both the results of such thinking.

Deng proposes an intelligent system for agriculture,outlining the advantages of intelligent agriculture development in China from three aspects:policy support,economic scale and development stage.He also points out five problems in China’s intelligent agriculture:lack of holistic planning;low data integrity and sharing;underdeveloped technologies;insufficient targeted investment;and low acceptance by practitioners.To solve those problems,he proposes to improve the comprehensive capacity of data collection,enrich algorithms and models,increase the research and development of terminal equipment,and create a docking platform.To promote the development of intelligent agriculture in China,he also puts forward four recommendations on overall planning,infrastructure development,union building and talent cultivation.

Hou’s paper focuses on the building of an intelligent society rather than on AI itself and its applications.She argues mainly about methods to contain the negative effects that intelligent society may bring to people.She thinks that we should use advanced AI technologies in a way that conforms to the norms of human values in order to facilitate rather than hinder the development of society.Therefore,in the evolution of intelligent society,we need to restrain instrumental rationality with value rationality,prevent human alienation caused by it while promoting human liberation,and clearly define the moral responsibilities of different moral subjects in the pursuit of capital multiplication,so as to ensure the basic direction of AI serving the healthy development of human society.In an age of much fanfare about AI,Hou’s views are coolheaded,insightful and enlightening.While appealing for the restraint of the intelligent society,she has also echoed the call of some other scholars to strengthen the ethical education of AI in China (Ren and Ye,2020),which makes her views both forward-looking and relevant to the current times.

AI technology is a new emergent technology,and the emergence of new technologies raises unprecedented ethical and legal problems.Jie Song’s paper discusses the ethical adjustment and legal regulations of modern technology in general,which is instructive for us in thinking about the ethical and legal issues of AI.

AI and its social applications have not yet reached a high level of maturity,universality and sophistication.However,AI’s development trend is unstoppable.What we can be certain about is that an intelligent society is already in sight,and it will dramatically change the way we think and act and transform our minds and society.There is much to be done in reflecting on the development of AI and envisioning its future.However,it will be fascinating to think about and study the shape,characteristics,operation models and mechanisms of intelligent society,as well as its relationship with the nonintelligent society (such as alternation,transition and articulation) at an early stage.I hope this special issue will inspire new research on these topics.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship and/or publication of this article:This work is supported by the Professional Think Tank Base of Beijing Association for Science and Technology(grant no.BASTZK-RWS-2020-0017).