HILLSDALE, Mich. — Hillsdale College hosted its third Center for Constructive Alternatives seminar of the 2024-25 academic year Feb. 2-5. The seminar, titled “Artificial Intelligence,” explored the ethical, military, and political ramifications of AI.
Erik D. Prince ’92, founder of Blackwater Worldwide, spoke on “AI and the Future Battlefield.”
“We don’t have a monopoly in innovation, but we have a critical mass of it, and a lot of that still resides in the military,” Prince said. “As long as DOD, just a little bit, opens the tap of money, redirecting from the nonsense, hyper-overpriced programs that they like to spend money on, we can certainly not just catch up but surpass any capability that we have to worry about with China.”
Aaron Kheriaty of the Ethics and Public Policy Center spoke on “Transhumanism and AI.”
“Organic matter is alive, whereas inorganic matter is dead. I can only conclude that the transhumanists’ dream is in the last analysis a philosophy of death,” Kheriaty said. “But we must grant that it has become an influential philosophy among many of today’s elites. In one way or another I would suggest that all of us, to some degree, have been seduced by the mistaken notion that by massively coordinated vigilance in the application of technology, we could rid our lived environments of all pathogens and scrub our world entirely clean, perhaps even thwarting death.”
Other topics included “AI as a Tool of Manipulating Public Opinion,” and “Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do,” with speakers including Bill Gertz, Mattias Desmet, Robert Epstein, and Erik J. Larson.