AI on Falling in Love: A Potential Course

In the film, Wall-E (2008), a robot “falls in love” with another, whose anthropomorphic pronoun is she/her rather than it as is fitting for a machine. As a robot does not have genitalia, neither the masculine or feminine single pronoun applies, and because a robot is an entity, the plural pronouns also do not apply. Word-games aside, the more substantive and interesting matter of whether a robot, and even AI (i.e., machine learning), can (or could potentially) understand the phenomenological experience of falling in love, and, whether yes or no, be able beyond mere prediction to match couples who would fall in love were they to meet. A college course on these questions, especially with relevant films including Wall-E and The Matrix being assigned, would be incredibly popular and capable of tremendous mind-stretching. 

Such a college course could be entitled, “Falling in Love with AI,” “AI: Falling in Love” or “Falling in Love: AI.” Is it conceivable or possible that a computer with AI could fall in love, whether with a human or another such computer? Can AI (i.e., a computer capable of machine-learning) understand the phenomenology of falling in love beyond its mechanistic aspects, such as in a person being attracted to long hair. The aspect of “chemistry,” or a “vibe” in the experience of falling in love goes beyond the mechanistic aspects. By analogy, states in the E.U. and U.S. have residual sovereignty, which goes beyond the powers enumerated for both the states and the respective unions Falling in love has a residual that I contend cannot be captured, understood, “felt,” or even predicted by AI. The residual is inherently beyond machine-learning.

In the subfield of philosophy of mind, the question has been raised (by Daniel Dennett, I believe): Does the manipulation of symbols according to rules constitute understanding? A computer could have an algorithm that applies rules to Chinese characters, which are symbols, and outputs Chinese characters. For example, a computer can be used to answer a question. This does not mean that the computer understands the question, or what the characters mean.  A person who does not know any Chinese could do the same thing: apply rules to particular symbols (or arrangements thereof) to answer questions in Chinese. Clearly, this is not to understand the symbols and thus the question (or the answer). Similarly, a computer even with AI could “match” couples on the basis of the likelihood that they would fall in love, but this feat does not require or mean that the computer understands the phenomenon of falling in love or can fall in love.

Manipulating symbols according to algorithmic rules does not reach the phenomenological residual (i.e., the totality of the experience) of falling in love. To the extent that AI does or can potentially do more than manipulating symbols according to rules, which is beyond my ken, it remains to ask whether AI can or is capable of falling in love, and, furthermore, whether such functionality is requisite to AI being able to match, beyond prediction, people who would fall in love were they to meet. In other words, in the film, Wall-E, computers do so much for people, including providing food, but could robots be match-makers in being able to assess who would fall in love with whom. I contend that given the human condition of being human, computers are not capable, nor will they, of providing everything. It may be that humans will one day be able to marry and even love humanoids, but this does not mean that the seemingly-fleshy computers will be able to fall in love with us.

Should Philosophers Sell Out to Business?

Should philosophers at universities, by which I mean scholars who hold a Ph.D. in philosophy, try to be relevant?  Nietzsche wrote that no philosopher is a person of one’s own day, but Adam Smith saw in philosophers the potential as observers rather than doers to observe occupations rather than Plato’s eternal moral verities or Aristotle’s prime mover way up high. Opinions on this question can reasonably differ, but under no circumstance should someone holding a MBA and DBA or Ph.D. in business claim to be a philosopher. This is especially true in North America, where doctoral students in business have not typically even taken ethics courses in philosophy. Indeed, I turned down a doctorate in business in part because my area would have been business ethics sans any coursework in philosophy, including ethics. I attempted to take the core graduate course in ethics, but the professor, Kurt Baier, announced at the end of the first class session that only philosophy students could enroll. Baier had the countenance of Schopenhauer, and both, ironically, focused on ethics academically. To be sure, doctoral students in business who already have a Ph.D. in philosophy may be counted as philosophers, and the dual degrees fit an orientation to observing and thinking about occupations rather than just on metaphysics or ontology.

In The Wealth of Nations, which is something like a bible in American business schools, Adam Smith wrote in 1776 (how fitting) that even though philosophers are “not to do anything, but to observe everything,” they are responsible for ‘improvements in machinery.”[1] This sounds a bit extreme: philosophers being oriented in their thinking to making improvements in machinery that is presumably used in businesses befitting the specialization of labor given its relative efficiencies and thus productivities. Nevertheless, “the huge array of occupations ‘present[s] an almost infinite variety of objects to the contemplation of those few, who, being attached to no particular occupation themselves, have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people,’ which ‘renders their understandings, in an extraordinary degree, both acute and comprehensive.’”[2] I think this is a compliment for philosophers, whose “work” of contemplation is actually leisure. But not being in another occupation, philosophers could hardly be expected to know it inside and out.

“Like the ancients, Smith accords a high priority to the development of the intellect,” but he “replaces the ‘vertical’ contemplation extolled by the ancients—philosophy as an ascent to the contemplation of Plato’s ‘ideas’ or Aristotle’s ‘unmoved mover’—with contemplation of occupations.”[3] Contemplating accounting, or management, however, may be received by philosophers as rather boring, and, not containing much thought. Reflecting on the impact of Plato’s eternal moral verities on the profession of certified pubic accountants, who are ethically obliged to be fair and impartial rather than exploitive of a personal or firm-wide conflict of interests, is more deserving of merit, academically speaking, but this assumes that the philosophers have graduate degrees in business as well as philosophy, and perhaps even some experience in a CPA firm.

Once while floating in the ocean just off Miami Beach, Florida, I happened to chat with the CPA partner from Deloitte who was in charge of making sure that the auditors don’t perform their audits in a way in which the client-company would suddenly realize the need for Deloitte consulting services. Although there were partners at Deloitte whose position was above the top of the partition, the man in the water exclaimed his certainty that an intraorganizational separation of the audit and consulting functions would be sufficient against any ethical lapses.  I disagreed. I didn’t want to mention that auditors at Deloitte even had a tick-mark notation for: “As per comptroller, discrepancy resolved.”  If the greed to retain an audit client was even in the tick-marks used by the auditors showing that the audits were not independent after all (i.e., given the reliance on the client’s comptroller), how much faith could be placed on the “Chinese wall” between auditing and consulting?  Yet the partner in charge of that wall believed that he couldn’t be wrong—or was he corrupt and thus lying to me.

I am not a business ethicist; I refused to accept the Ph.D. in business from a very corrupt American business school in part because the program in business ethics only had management coursework. Of course, plenty of minted business-ethics “scholars” eagerly accept their doctorate. I chatted once with one from MIT, who claimed that ethics is a sub-field of sociology rather than philosophy. I didn’t want to upset her, so I did not point out that, given David Hume’s naturalistic fallacy, a social norm is not an ethical principle, so such a norm cannot be used to justify an action ethically. You can’t get ought from is; something more is needed: a reasoned rationale for why something that is ought to be. Instead, I merely said that I was not an expert or scholar of business ethics; I had refused that degree, as it was the pits. Fortunately, I would go on to another university to do four years of doctoral studies in historical political theory after having earned the MBA and M.Div. degrees. I had moved from business to the humanities and never looked back.

So, I am skeptical of Smith’s move from philosophical reasoning to the project of improving the machinery of occupations. Even as for business ethics, philosophers are likely to be sidelined by business practitioners. A specialization of labor can exist wherein the contemplation of philosophers is distinct from the manual labor of a construction worker or a manager of a business even though there can be overlap. Smith’s assumption, moreover, that the “practical” world trumps the world of contemplation and ratiocination has by in large been swallowed by Western society from the mid-twentieth-century at least to the 2020s, but here is where the philosophers can come in to critically examine this assumption and perhaps even think about alternatives. At the very least, the default assumption would be viewed in relative rather than absolute terms. When I left business for the humanities, my underlying assumption was different from Smith’s, though not from his more basic assumption that we humans are seldom satisfy with our lot, so we tend to be in motion to better our condition. This more basic assumption allows in the philosophers and even the even less productive religious people. Production, it turns out, goes beyond commercial society.

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1. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, I.i.9, quoted by Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 84.
2. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, V.i.f.51, quoted by Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 85.
3. Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 85

Just the Facts: Empirical Social Science Overplayed

Tilburg University in the E.U. is known to have an emphasis on empirical studies in the social sciences (including business). With this bent, the university is typically considered to be closer to the American academic tradition than that of Europa. So when Dr. Diederik Stapel, a psychology professor at Tilburg, acknowledged to having committed academic fraud in several dozen published articles in academic journals, the academic status of empirical research itself was thrown into question. Experts point out that Stapel “took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged.” Indeed, it is rare even for peer-reviewers of potential articles to demand to see the raw empirical data supporting a given study’s conclusions. According to Dr. Jelte Wicherts, a psychology professor at the University of Amsterdam, the problem of data being misused by the scholars who collect and analyze it is widespread in the discipline of psychology.
In a survey of more than 2,000 American psychology professors, Leslie John of Harvard Business School found that 70 percent had acknowledged (anonymously) to cutting some corners in reporting data. Add to this the problem of unintended statistical errors and the problem of being able to rely on scientific results becomes acute. Dr. Joseph Simmons, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business says, “We know the general tendency of humans to draw the conclusions they want to draw.”
Indeed, the “academic” field of corporate social responsibility has been rife with “scholars” writing to impose or justify their critical ideology of the modern corporation. For example, at Amiti Etzioni’s conference at Harvard Business School on his theory (or movement?) on socio-economics, one professor demanded that the participants form a labor party. The Harvard professors in attendance pointed out that Etzioni was simply trashing the neo-classical economic paradigm (economic liberalism, or free-market competition) without proffering an alternative theory. This did not stop Dr. Etzioni from continuing to advance his agenda, which I submit was precisely to condemn the neo-classical economic theory. Similarly, “scholars” of CSR tend to presume that corporations have an obligation to share corporate governance with stakeholder groups and give more philanthropically. Never mind that the purported obligation is typically not justified beyond the “scholar’s” own ideology. I would be surprised if the empirical research was not highly skewed in the direction of that ideology.
Of course, the problem of empirical science is not limited to disciplines such as psychology and business & society, which are particularly subject to ideology. Once I sat in on a doctoral seminar on strategy. The professor, who would go on to get tenure at a major business school, advised the doctoral students to check with the managements of the companies they are surveying before publishing the results in case any of the managements do not like the conclusions. Otherwise, the “professor” observed, consulting opportunities might be diminished. That several of the students had been bankers and would be conducting empirical studies of the financial sector ought to concern anyone who has heard of “too big to fail” and the related over-reliance on models designed to manage risk.
So whether in dealing with human psychology or huge financial firms, skewed empirical research can be dangerous. Politically, the CSR agenda could result in too much power being amassed by stakeholder groups at the expense of property rights. Moreover, the discipline of psychology (and that of business ethics) suggests that the emphasis on empirical studies, particularly at American universities, is ahistoric. Before the twentieth century, psychology was part of philosophy. Perhaps the problems with empirical science might lead to a re-consideration of the value of philosophical psychology in terms of knowledge as well as practice. Similarly, the interlarding of business ethics (a subfield of ethics, which in turn is a field of philosophy) with empirical surveys—as if what is counts for what ought to be—can be questioned. Rarely does a business ethicist stop to wonder why philosophers do not send out surveys as part of doing philosophy. David Hume’s naturalistic fallacy provides a good explanation for why they do not.
My overall point is that the value of empirical studies in the social sciences (and applied philosophy) have been overstated, particularly at American universities, while theory development and the historic housing in philosophy have been relegated or dismissed outright. Along with the hypertrophy in empiricism has come a “cubby-hole” mentality wherein Frederick Taylor’s specialization of labor has somehow been applied to scholarship. One could excuse business schools for conflating what they are studying with what they are. The problem is when the academic enterprise itself comes to resemble enterprises that make widgets. It is no accident, I submit, that the twentieth century will not be known for many bright spots in the social sciences or philosophy. One could say that Plato and Nietzsche make good book-ends, with engineers and natural scientists taking over to produce a technological and information revolution. Yet who asks what the opportunity costs have been in reducing progress to the technological variety? What cost was there in the twentieth century in having technicians and ideologues for philosophers, rather than thinkers capable of seeing the big picture and proffering unique vistas? If the case of Dr. Stapel comes as a surprise, it might be because we have become too ensconced with “facts” at the expense of meaning.

Source: 

Benedict Carey, “Fraud Case Seen as a Red Flag for Psychology Research,” The New York Times, November 3, 2011. 

Ethical Theory in Business Ethics Courses

It may seem like an oxymoron, but faculty administrators at even research universities can be hopelessly narrow-minded regarding knowledge and how it is to be conveyed. For example, how often are faculty members encouraged to give a lecture or two re-teaching material largely missed on exams (followed by another, shorter examination on that material)? Do faculty administrators work with faculty members in professional schools to see to it that the applied courses are not severed from their basic (i.e., more theoretical substratum) discipline? One of the secrets in the “sauce” at Yale’s professional schools (e.g., Law, Divinity, etc.) is this salience of the respective basic disciplines (e.g., political theory and theology, respectively). Synergy comes gushing through once the false dichotomy is recognized. Before I went to Yale, I was a masters and doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh, where the dichotomy was alive and well in the university’s social reality; I had to “walk back” the dichotomy myself as I discovered philosophy (and religious studies) while I was still studying business.

Business ethics was one of my doctoral fields of study at Pitt. The philosophy department there was at the time one of the best in the U.S., so used an elective to take my first course in the discipline. I began with two intro courses; before I knew it, I was taking junior and senior courses, such logic and philosophy of mind. The latter course turned out to be the most intellectually intense course I took in my 18 years as a university student (had I discovered philosophy in college, I would have three rather than five degrees). It occurred to me at the time to start taking ethical theory courses, as business ethics was one of my doctoral fields. Within philosophy, I gravitated to practical philosophy—in particular, to ethics, political theory, and philosophy of religion. I treated these as foundations for the field of business, government, and society in business.

It dawned on me that none of the business doctoral students concentrating in business ethics had taken an ethical theory course in philosophy. That is to say, I was stunned to find a subfield of ethics reduced to management. Ethics proper is a subfield of philosophy, not business; ergo, business ethics is ultimately grounded in philosophy, with managerial implications. I think business schools have put the cart before the horse and letting go of the horse. A cart without a horse isn't going to go very far (though perhaps it can go in circles).

From my educational experience, I contend that ethics courses in business schools ought to emphasize ethical theory, with managerial implications/applications used as much to illustrate the theories as to understand the ethical dimension of business. Managers in the business world have told me that business schools should do what corporate training cannot, rather than being duplicative. I think deans miss this point, perhaps because they are so oriented to sucking up to corporate managers in order to get corporate donations. In my own thinking, theory enlivens rather than detracts from praxis. I think business school faculties are in the grips of the false dichotomy. Corporate managers would doubtless admit that they are ill-equipped to teach ethical theory. Moreover, training is a better fit with what corporate folks do. Business schools, or else philosophy departments, could offer regular as well as continuing education courses in business ethics with ethical theory readings, lectures, and discussions going beyond the superficial “rights, utility, and justice” hackneyed reductionism of business ethics courses in business schools.