Robot Souls: Programming in Humanity
About this ebook
Looking closely at the human blueprint, it contains a suite of capacities that are so clumsy they have generally been kept away from AI. It was assumed that robots with features like emotions and intuition, that made mistakes and looked for meaning and purpose, would not work as well as robots without this kind of code. But on considering why all these irrational properties are there, it seems that they emerge from the source code of soul. Because it is actually this ‘junk’ code that makes us human and promotes the kind of reciprocal altruism that keeps humanity alive and thriving.
Robot Souls looks at developments in AI and reviews the emergence of ideas of consciousness and the soul. It places our ‘junk code’ in this context and argues that it is time to foreground that code, and to use it to look again at how we are programming AI.
The book author Eve Poole received an OBE in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to education and gender equality.
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About the author
Eve Poole has a BA from Durham, an MBA from Edinburgh, and a PhD from Cambridge. She has an OBE for services to education and gender equality and is a Life Fellow of the RSA. Following a career at Deloitte and Ashridge Business School, she was Chairman of Gordonstoun (2015-2021), Third Church Estates Commissioner for England (2018-2021), and Interim Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2022). Her previous books include Capitalism’s Toxic Assumptions, Buying God, and Leadersmithing, which was highly commended in the 2018 Business Book Awards.
