What If Marx Had Had ChatGPT?: Revolutionising Philosophy Just Like the iPhone Transformed the Telephone

The musician Will.i.am has launched a new interactive radio platform powered by AI. The platform, called ‘RAiDiO.FYI', features AI presenters and aims to revolutionize radio in a way similar to how the iPhone transformed the telephone.

Unlike Spotify's AI DJ, which uses AI to suggest songs based on your listening habits, RAiDiO.FYI allows for two-way communication, enabling users to engage with AI personas by pressing a button at any point to ask questions or start discussions. These AI hosts interact directly with listeners, encouraging them to ask about music, song history or even discuss topics like news, sports, culture and fashion, making listeners ‘active participants’ in the listening experience.

But that’s radio. What would the equivalent be for philosophy, I wonder?

Or might the more intriguing approach be to move beyond using AI merely as a tool to complement, augment or enhance human creativity like this: even if it involves using small language model AI trained on a corpus of ‘meaningful’, subject-specific data to enable readers to enter into a form of personalised Socratic dialogue with an otherwise conventional human-authored book in which they can ask it questions and the book can reply.

(It is something of this kind the e-reading platform Rebind is offering with regard to classic works of literature by Austen, Conrad and Kafka.)

Would it not be more interesting to explore the potential of an AI platform for creating radical new forms of philosophy altogether - forms that may no longer even be recognisable as philosophy as we currently understand it?