Mia Bay has won a 2022 Bancroft Prize for Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance.We have a capacity to imagine singular causation. From the point of view of practical action, knowledge of what generally causes what is often all one needs. On the CBC Radio program Ideas, Annelien de Dijn, author of Freedom: An Unruly History, unpacked how the modern political understanding of “freedom”-centering the idea of limited government-emerged from attempts by privileged elites to defend their own interests. Causation in Psychology makes the case that singular causation is essential and unique to the human species.At Slate, The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution authors Joseph Fishkin and William Forbath warned that, while the Republican Party boldly transforms constitutional doctrine, the Democratic Party seems to have forgotten a long tradition of constitutional argument that speaks directly to the problems of inequality and oligarchy.New Statesman spoke with Thomas Piketty about A Brief History of Equality and why he’s optimistic about the future of the (global) Left.An excerpt from Brian Hochman’s The Listeners, on how Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 wiretap thriller The Conversation captured the rise of a surveillance society, was published at the Literary Hub site CrimeReads.The capacity to imagine singular causation, Campbell contends, is a core element of human freedom and of the ability to empathize with human thoughts and feelings. Unlike robots and nonhuman animals, we don’t have to rely on axioms about pain to know how ongoing suffering is affecting someone’s ability to make decisions, for example, and this knowledge is not a derivative of general rules. He argues that, while a social robot can remember the details of a person’s history better than some spouses can, it cannot empathize with the human mind, because it lacks the faculty for thinking in terms of singular causation.Ĭausation in Psychology makes the case that singular causation is essential and unique to the human species.
Might they provide humanlike friendship? Philosopher John Campbell doesn’t think so. This droid prompts the question of what we can hope from social robots. People pour their hearts out in response.
“What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Guided by an onboard video camera, it roams hotel lobbies and conference centers, asking questions in the voice of a seven-year-old:
A renowned philosopher argues that singular causation in the mind is not grounded in general patterns of causation, a claim on behalf of human distinctiveness, which has implications for the future of social robots.Ī blab droid is a robot with a body shaped like a pizza box, a pair of treads, and a smiley face.