Mark D. White

Writer, editor, teacher

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about

I’m a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, where I teach courses in philosophy, economics, and law, and the author/editor/co-editor of several books.

Category: Isaac Asimov

  • Which is “harder”: social science or physical science?

    Mark D. White Yesterday, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones spoke up for social science following an editorial in Nature arguing against the NSF's proposed defunding of research in political science. Here's a bit of the op-ed: Part of the blame must lie with the practice of labelling the social sciences as soft, which too readily translates as…

  • On Artifical Intelligence and Personhood (with thanks to Isaac Asimov)

    Mark D. White Thanks to Larry Solum's Legal Theory Blog, I became aware of F. Patrick Hubbard's new paper "'Do Androids Dream?': Personhood and Intelligent Artifacts," forthcoming in Temple Law Review, which considers the issue of granting the status of personhood to an artificial intelligence: This Article proposes a test to be used in answering…

  • Ethical robots?

    Mark D. White Thanks to Orly Lobel at Prawfsblawg for pointing out this New York Times Magazine piece on new ideas. The one he points out in particular involves "ethical robots" (scroll down in the piece a few items), which will be programmed with basic ethical tenets and will perform more reliably (according to this programming) on…