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Articles

Just Science Fiction?

Andrew Reynolds says not..

For decades, science fiction has explored our distrust of computers. The examples are legion: HAL in 2001; Proteus in Demon Seed and the Defense Network Computers in The Terminator to give but three. So, it would be easy to imagine that computer ethics was a sub-genre of SF rather than an area of serious philosophical study.

But what these and many other SF treatments of computing have in common is that the computers are sentient. The computers in these stories have a value system that informs their capacity for free action.

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