Building AI That Can Do Philosophy Better Than Us (guest post)

“Our central ambition is philosophy on demand: philosophical judgment of exceptional depth and quality, available quickly enough to inform consequential decisions.” That’s Graham Clay, writing about Pensatura, an AI philosophy system he and Caleb Ontiveros are developing. Pensatura “coordinates AI tasks that investigate sources, develop arguments, examine objections and construct an overall answer [to a philosophical question], retaining the resulting work so later inquiries can use, challenge and extend it. Each argument in the record states its premises, taken jointly, and an explicit claim about how they support its conclusion. That support claim can itself have grounds and face objections. Interpretations preserve their sources and rival readings; improvements are distinguished from what an author actually argued. The intended result is an expanding body of reasoning whose conclusions remain connected to the grounds on which they depend.” They report that they’ve built a “working…