Waves: the Spring 2021 issue
From the Editors
Our inaugural issue letter reflected on the creativity and resilience of communities around the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. That was back in December, a few days after the FDA authorized the first COVID-19 mRNA vaccine for emergency use. Since then, over 40% of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated and people are starting to imagine what life might be like.
The pandemic taught us a lot about what we can—and cannot—live without and how much we’re willing to sacrifice to protect one another. As we head into the summer with a mixture of uncertainty and hope, we are thrilled to publish work by two undergraduate authors who are thinking constructively about the future of human (and transhuman) creativity and ethics.
Armaan Kalkat’s fascinating essay, “William ShAIkespeare? AI and the Quest for Creativity,” argues for the viability and potential value of AI creativity. A linguistics and psychology double-major specializing in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, Kalkat interrogates what creativity is from both a neurocognitive and philosophical perspective and explains some of the complex hurdles to developing creative AI.
In “Strong Nonconsequentialist Solution to the New Problem of Numbers in Morality,” Jackson Anderson contests Fiona Woollard’s 2014 critique of Strong Nonconsequentialist solutions to what she calls the “Old Problem of Numbers in Morality.”
Five people are stranded on one rock. One person is stranded on another. In your boat, you are able to reach either rock before the tide comes in, but not both. Anyone left standing on a rock at high tide will drown.
This scenario is one of many similar thought experiments, such as the Trolley Problem, designed to prompt debates about whether it is ethical in various circumstances to sacrifice an individual person to save many. After walking us through Woollard’s argument, Anderson posits a novel solution that foregrounds empathy in an effort to reconcile seemingly incongruous ethical positions.
We are excited by the fortuitous dialogue between Anderson’s and Kalkat’s pieces, which highlights the necessity of interdisciplinary thinking that bridges the humanities, arts, and sciences. Advances in AI are reinvigorating old philosophical debates as well as generating new ones. Say, for example, a pedestrian suddenly darts across the path of a self-driving car carrying one passenger. Do car manufacturers engineer self-driving cars that protect their own passengers at all costs? That protect other drivers and pedestrians? That protect the greatest number of people in a given situation? Or, as Yuval Harari (2018) muses, should companies leave it up to the customer to choose between the “Tesla Altruist and Tesla Egoist?”
Such dilemmas show us that questions about cognition, creativity, and ethics are complex and exigent, and we applaud the issue’s authors for exploring them in such compelling ways.
We hope you enjoy these original and timely pieces and look forward to your submissions.
—The Waves team
Artificial Intelligence
William ShAIkespeare?: AI and the Quest for Creativity, by Armaan Kalkat
Moral Philosophy
Strong Nonconsequentialist Solution to the New Problem of Numbers in Morality, by Jackson Anderson
Armaan Kalkat
“Being a linguistics major, I had already been interested in the way language shapes our identities and how we define what it means to be human. So much of our history has been devoted to understanding our innate drive for self-expression, and I believe that one of the vital turning points in this quest will come as a result of innovation like that which is the topic of this paper, when humans look for ways to reverse-engineer our own traits and come to better understand ourselves through our attempts to impart said traits to other beings. Of course it can appear to be an exercise in narcissism and self-aggrandizement, but it can simultaneously be an act of beautiful creation in the pursuit of knowledge.”
Jackson Anderson
“This paper was initially written while taking an undergraduate Moral Philosophy course at the University of Florida. The course exposed me to the schools of ethics as well as a multitude of corresponding readings and ideas. I have found studying the evolution of the problem of numbers fascinating and, with the addition of Woollard’s New Problem of Numbers, I felt that I might be getting close to the topic’s modern frontier. It is my hope that others can learn from the proposed solution that I present in this paper so that they may criticize, strengthen, and evolve it.”