Fisher's Argument

Fisher criticizes a claim, made independently by Boden and Sloman, that "the collision between the concepts of free action and of scientific knowledge can be avoided, thanks to a new understanding of the former afforded by the new discipline of artificial intelligence (AI)."

Fisher takes exception: there is nothing AI can offer which will convince us that free will is possible in a deterministic universe, since free will and determinism conflict. “The conflict can be described with maximum brevity as the collision between the necessity demanded by scientific knowledge and the possibility demanded by free action.”

Fisher is asserting incompatibilism, where incompatibilism is the thesis that free action cannot exist if determinism is true. In Fisher’s understanding of incompatibilism, any true explanation necessarily involves causal laws, which are necessarily deterministic. It follows that there can be no sense in which an agent could have done otherwise, since any true description of the agent's action must be an instance of a causal law if it is explicable at all.

Boden and Sloman argue that as AI becomes better at enabling computers to exemplify planning behaviors, purposeful behaviors, intentional behaviors, etc., it will become clear how the free action is possible. Fisher admits that much of what Boden and Sloman anticipate for AI may come to pass, but he argues that nothing AI can offer will help the cause of compatibilism.

In so arguing, it is apparent that Fisher is more than a mere incompatibilist: he is a hard determinist. A hard determinist is an incompatibilist who thinks that determinism is true. Hard determinists, therefore, reject the possibility of free action.

Thus Fisher extends the hard determinist’s case against human freedom to machine autonomy. Any problems with the hard determinist’s case are inherited, since machine autonomy is assumed to be nothing more than a species of human autonomy.