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Articles

Mathematics, Morality & Machines

William Byers, mathematician, and Michael Schleifer, moral theorist, use their judgement to calculate the improbability of a machine thinking like a human being.

An ongoing debate, much discussed in the pages of this magazine, involves the extent to which the human mind can be modeled by digital computers. Is every human activity potentially programmable? Our response is “Clearly not.” We propose to support our case with considerations from an unusual combination of fields, namely, mathematics and ethics. Contrary to the views of some recent contributors to Philosophy Now (in Issue 72), we do not accept the possibility of ‘moral machines’, nor even of ‘mathematical machines’, if by the latter is meant machines which can replicate what a mathematician understands as ‘doing mathematics’. And morality and math (our fields of study) are not the only areas where an unbridgeable gulf exists between computers and human beings.

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