Killing Sophia: Consciousness, Empathy, and Reason in the Age of Intelligent Robots

Humanlike robots and digital humans are both fun and useful in many situations. But the more we interact with technology with human traits, the more we believe it to possess real human characteristics like consciousness and personality. As a new breed of artificial beings enters society on a large scale, many of us will start believing they deserve moral consideration and perhaps even rights.

In this entertaining and humorously written book, Thomas Telving argues that even though the above scenario is close to inevitable, we should still do all we can to avoid it. Presenting us with thought-provoking future scenarios, state of the art scientific research, and engaging philosophical reflections, he shows us how to avoid some of the scariest pitfalls of human-like technology.

“The rapid development in (embodied) artificial intelligence is all but certain to change our lives in the coming years. Using a philosophical framework, Thomas Telving convincingly presents a number of pitfalls following a large increase in human-robot interaction. He joins the important roboethic debate on what future we want to live in, and what it takes for humanity to keep the upper hand in shaping it.” — Tobias Larsen, PhD in Computational Neuroscience from the University of Bristol and senior data scientist at Oviva AG.

“Artificial intelligence and advanced robots are increasingly used in science and society, and in many ways they outperform human capabilities. An important question is how our moral and legal stance towards robots will develop when their human likeness increases. In this entertaining new book Thomas Telving takes us through possible scenarios seen in a philosophical perspective. Enlightening, thought-provoking and highly recommended.” — Jacob J. K. Kirkensgaard, PhD, Associate Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen.