The real question about AI is not whether it will take your job. It is whether it can think, whether it deserves trust, and whether we are building tools or building replacements. Intellectual Prestige brings philosophical rigor to the AI debate – from Carnap’s verification problem applied to hallucinating chatbots, to Descartes’ skepticism repackaged as AI security, to the uncomfortable question of why we forgive machines for mistakes that would end a human career. Philosophy built the framework for intelligence. We use it to interrogate the artificial kind.
There is a comforting story being told about artificial intelligence. The story goes like this. AI will help us think more clearly. It will save us time. It will free us from boring work so we can focus on the meaningful parts of life. It will make us smarter, fitter, more productive, more creative. We […]
Why AI Will Reinforce Our Worst Habits, Not Break Them Read More »
In 1790, a French mathematician named Nicolas de Condorcet wrote something that should have ended several debates before they even began. He argued that rights were not gifts handed down by kings or granted by tradition. They were the logical consequence of being a thinking creature capable of suffering, reasoning, and forming preferences about its
Why AI Needs Human Rights: Condorcet’s Framework for Defining Sentience and Agency Read More »
There is a seductive idea floating around. It goes something like this: the reason central planning failed in the Soviet Union was not that central planning is inherently flawed. It failed because the planners were human. They were slow, biased, and working with pencils and telegrams. Give the job to a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence,
Why an AI-Managed Economy Would Still Result in a Bread Line Read More »
There is a surgeon in an operating room. She nicks an artery. The patient bleeds out on the table. There will be lawsuits. There will be investigations. Her career might end. Her name will appear in newspapers. Strangers on the internet will call her a murderer. Now imagine a robotic surgical system does the same
Why We Forgive Robots for Mistakes We Would Kill a Human For Read More »
René Descartes sat in a room in 1641 and decided to doubt everything. Not some things. Everything. The floor beneath him, the fire in front of him, even his own hands. He wanted to find one thing he could not doubt and build all of knowledge on top of it. He landed on “I think,
Skepticism as a Service: Applying Descartes to AI Security Read More »
You talk to your AI assistant more than you talk to your neighbor. You thank it. You apologize to it when you rephrase a question. You might even feel a small pang of guilt when you close the tab mid conversation. And somewhere in 17th century France, René Descartes is spinning in his grave. Or
In 1600, merchants convinced Queen Elizabeth I to grant them a monopoly on trade with the East Indies. The pitch: we’ll bring back exotic goods, expand English influence, and share profits with the Crown. In 2015, technologists convinced Silicon Valley that AI should be developed as a nonprofit for humanity’s benefit. The pitch: we’ll build
Why OpenAI is the New East India Company (A David Ricardo Reading) Read More »
In October 2024, the Australian government discovered something alarming in a $440,000 report from Deloitte: fabricated quotes, non-existent academic sources, and a citation from a federal court judgment that never existed. The culprit wasn’t a lazy consultant but an AI system that had “hallucinated” its references. This wasn’t an isolated incident. Across courtrooms, hospitals, universities,
Why We Need ‘Verification Bots’: Carnap’s Plan to End Fake AI Facts Read More »
AI revolution quietly started in a modest room in the Netherlands, where a French philosopher sat by his stove and contemplated the nature of thought itself. The year was 1637, and Rene Descartes was about to publish a work that would inadvertently lay the conceptual groundwork for the artificial intelligence revolution (AI) that would unfold
Why the AI Revolution Was Predicted by Radical Rene Descartes in 1637, Netherlands Read More »
The question if machines can truly think has haunted us since the first computers began solving mathematical problems at speeds that put human calculators to shame. Today, as artificial intelligence systems write poetry, diagnose diseases, and engage in conversations that can fool us into thinking we’re talking to another person, the question feels more urgent