Empathy and Instrumentalization: Late Ancient Cultural Critique and the Challenge of Apparently Personal Robots
Jordan Wales teaches historical theology at Hillsdale College. His research focuses on early Christian understandings of seeing God as well as contemporary theological and philosophical questions relating to human moral formation and Artificial Intelligence. He received his M.T.S. and Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame after studying under a British Marshall Scholarship in the UK, where he received a Diploma in Theology from Oxford and a M.Sc. in Cognitive Science and Natural Language from the University of Edinburgh. He graduated with highest honors from Swarthmore College with a B.S. in Engineering and a minor in Physiological Psychology. He was the recipient of a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
Near-future consumer products will include persuasive social robots that will attract us by their apparent subjectivity but that—by design—will invite us to instrumentalize that subjectivity as a tool of our desires. How are we to “use” them without growing comfortable with slaveholding? Turning to the thought of early fifth-century North African philosopher Augustine of Hippo, I extend his reflections on human relationships with persons and artefacts to suggest how our empathy toward apparently personal possessions might be exercised in a manner that can upbuild rather than erode our capacity for authentic interpersonal intimacy.
