CONCEPT
The Node Is Real
Appiah's insistence that the individual possesses inherent dignity — a specificity, irreplaceability, and perspective that no network can replicate — which grounds moral resistance to the commoditization of human value in the AI age.
The Wharton experiment that rated GPT-4's ethical advice as more trustworthy than Appiah's own raises a question his framework is uniquely equipped to answer: what does the philosopher possess that the machine does not? The response begins with a distinction so fundamental that missing it makes the experimental results unintelligible — the distinction between the output and the position from which the output is produced. GPT-4 can do what Appiah does. GPT-4 cannot be what Appiah is. The machine cannot occupy the position of a Ghanaian-British philosopher who has lived on three continents, lost a parent, raised a family, and accumulated the specific, unrepeatable experience of being himself in the world for seven decades. The node is real because the position is real.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Wharton School experiment led by Christian Terwiesch in 2023 took moral dilemmas of the kind Appiah addresses in his New York Times Magazine ethics column