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INTRODUCTION: FROM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO ARTIFICIAL MEANING
As artificial intelligences (AI) become more powerful and pervasive, communication by, with, and among AIs has become a common feature of everyday life. Early in the history of AI, there was ELIZA-a simple program that utilized simple pattern-matching algorithms to simulate a psychotherapist interacting with the user of the program. 1 Human communication with AIs has been depicted in film and fiction, from the iconic confrontation of humans with HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey 2 to the very human Theodore who falls in love with an artificially intelligent operating system named Samantha in Her.3 But complex communication with AIs is part of everyday life in modern technological societies, including Apple's Siri, automated telephonic service systems for airlines, online ordering systems for merchants like Amazon.com, and characters in video games who converse with human players. All of these contexts involve artificial meaning, which we can contrast with communications by natural persons (human beings)-which we can call natural meaning.
This Essay investigates the concept of artificial meaning, meanings produced by entities other than individual natural persons. That investigation begins in Part I with a preliminary inquiry in the meaning of "meaning," in which the concept of meaning is disambiguated. The relevant sense of "meaning" for the purpose of this inquiry is captured by the idea of communicative content, although the phrase "linguistic meaning" is also a rough equivalent. Part II presents a thought experiment, The Chinese Intersection, which investigates the creation of artificial meaning produced by an AI that creates legal rules for the regulation of a hyper-complex conflux of transportation systems. The implications of the thought experiment are explored in Part III, which sketches a theory of the production of communicative content by AI. Part IV returns to The Chinese Intersection, but Version 2.0 involves a twist-after a technological collapse, the AI is replaced by humans engaged in massive collaboration to duplicate the functions of the complex processes that had formerly governed the flow of automotive, bicycle, light-rail, and pedestrian traffic. The second thought experiment leads in Part V to an investigation of the production of artificial meaning by group agents-artificial persons constituted by rules that govern the interaction of natural persons. The payoff of the investigation...