Long before the hardware was available, professors and their postdocs devised software that conjured our best selves—tolerant, open-minded, considerate, free of all taint of scheming, malice or prejudice. Theorists anticipated a refined artificial intelligence, guided by well-designed principles, that would learn by roaming over thousands, millions, of moral dilemmas. Such intelligence could teach us how to be, how to be good. Humans were ethically flawed—inconsistent, emotionally labile, prone to biases, to errors in cognition, many of which were self-serving. Long before there was even a
...more
