Ethical consequences of autonomous AI. Challenges to empiricist and rationalist philosophy of mind

The possibility of autonomous artificially intelligent systems (AAIs) has awaken a well-known worry in the scientific community as well as in popular imaginary: the possibility that beings which have gained autonomous intelligence either turn against their creators or at least make the moral and ethical superiority of creators with respect to the created questionable. The present paper argues that such worries are wrong-headed. Specifically, if AAIs raise a worry about human ways of life or human value it is a worry for a certain human way of thinking about what it is to be human. What is threatened is a way of thinking about what it is to be human, not human ways of life or human value.