The Philosophy is Settled?

We have heard plenty of debates online on whether “the science is settled.” At IO9 we see that some people are claiming “the philosophy is settled”:

"I honestly don't find any inspiration in the three laws of robotics," said Helm. "The consensus in machine ethics is that they're an unsatisfactory basis for machine ethics." The Three Laws may be widely known, he says, but they're not really being used to guide or inform actual AI safety researchers or even machine ethicists.

"One reason is that rule-abiding systems of ethics — referred to as 'deontology' — are known to be a broken foundation for ethics. There are still a few philosophers trying to fix systems of deontology — but these are mostly the same people trying to shore up 'intelligent design' and 'divine command theory'," says Helm. "No one takes them seriously."

I didn't know philosophy could be settled to such an extent. For one thing, it's hard to check philosophy against the real world.

But wait, there's more. We see a few paragraphs later from the same source:

"I think it would be unwise to design artificial intelligence systems or robots to be self-aware or conscious," says Helm. "And unlike movies or books where AI developers 'accidentally' get conscious machines by magic, I don't expect that could happen in real life. People won't just bungle into consciousness by accident — it would take lots of effort and knowledge to hit that target. And most AI developers are ethical people, so they will avoid creating what philosophers would refer to as a 'beings of moral significance.' Especially when they could just as easily create advanced thinking machines that don't have that inherent ethical liability."

So… He disbelieves in ‘intelligent design’ except in one field? Maybe he should recall that biological intelligence happened by the process he doesn't believe can work with machine intelligence.