One type of intelligence is obviously possible, the one occurring in nature. So why not Another Type of Intelligence?
While it may indeed be true that intelligence might in principle be differently incarnated or materialized elsewhere in the Universe or what have you, it would still have to exhibit sufficient similarity to actually-existing intelligence to justify the application of the term in the first place.
I believe that the “intelligence” the singularitarian superlative futurologists imagine they are pursuing disregards the embodiment, the sociality, and any number of the indispensable capacities that accompany actually existing intelligence in the world.
Rather than facilitating the construction of artificial intelligence the discourse of AI in your hands functions primarily to impoverish to the point of complete insensitivity our grasp of intelligence as it actually exists, an insensitivity that renders us ever more likely to neglect, misconstrue, and destroy it. That is not a desirable outcome in my view.
How does an AI break any known law of nature?
There aren’t any AIs in the world to break the laws of nature so your verb "does" simply does not apply. What I’m saying, again, is that the words you are using betray deep confusions in your aspirations.
Come to think of it, though, I’m curious: Just what would you lose exactly were you to describe what you think you want in AI in terms that require no bedeviling anthropomorphisms -- no conjurations of intelligence, smartness, friendliness, ethics, personality, the status of actor, and so on?
I’m not saying this to reduce our dispute to a terminological squabble (I personally don’t think that it is just that), nor am I saying that you should tweak your language to make it more “politically correct” and that would end my objections. I am asking you how the loss of these anthropomorphizing frames and figures would disconnect you with what it is you think you are onto in this quest for superintelligent AI.
I daresay you might find it an immensely clarifying exercise to drain your quest of its rhetorical anthropomorphisms for a change —- especially inasmuch as your present discourse functions to drain actually-existing exhibitions of intelligence of these dimensions anyhow, leading you to misconstrue your peers as glandular calculators crunching numbers rather than passionate precarious story tellers as concerned with making sense of things as reckoning with consequences.
No one’s claiming that we’re going to be creating something similar to natural intelligence
Nonsense. That claim is made endlessly by Robot Cultists. But quite apart from that, the claim of similarity is included in the very use of the term in any case -- and a whole host of terms that accompany it in the discourse. At any rate so it seems to me.
I’m not sure your own line of work is capable of producing any lasting contributions to humanity. Which is why you could try doing something else for a change with that razor-sharp mind of yours
I do not share your apparent preference for the so-called “getters-of-results” over the thinkers and poets who “never get anywhere.” I wouldn’t want to choose between them, respecting both in their proper precincts (and most people are mixes of both anyway), but if I had to choose, it would be the ones you dismiss as wastes of mind without lasting contributions to make I would choose every time (unless he’s hot).
providing verbal diarrhea
The regularity with which my way of talking is identified very specifically with shit by superlative futurologists (among them "transhumanist" spokesmen like Giulio Prisco and James Hugehs) just because I pay attention to different things than they do and apply different assumptions and have a different style of expression really is a bit odd. There is, I think, something hysterical about it, another trace of that body-loathing of theirs that disdains "the meat" of the body and the embodied brain and seduces them into identification with a roboticized digitized post-biological post-humanity.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. The people we should be listening to -- exclusively, some say -- are the ones inventing it, at this very moment.
More superlative go-getterism. Look, prediction and control is indeed indispensable to a good life, but it is far from the whole of intelligence and far from enough to provide for human flourishing. Even perfect prediction without meaning is a desolation not a consummation of human agency, and however high your pile of facts you’ll never find any values or stories in it to find meaning in.
It is a dreadful thing to substitute the openness of the present (including that present that will be tomorrow when it actually arrives) which is our actually-existing measure of freedom in the world in the company of the diversity of our peers, for a closed idealized instrumentalized outcome with which you identify personally and to which you give your whole heart called The Future and which you seem to have mistaken for emancipation. It is almost as if your discourse would turn you into a Robot in the present, when you fancy it will provide you an army of robot slaves to command in The Future for which you would give up the frustrating substance of your freedom for now and for ever.
when an engineer or a scientist speaks, I listen. Even better, when a company speaks
Welcome to the joyous prison-planet of the Robot Cult — engineers, scientists, and company men and their interminable dullard dance of death. I guess "Singularitarian" is a more apt designation for your community than I even knew — cheerleaders for the future as an endlessly prolonged boring Black Hole of go-getters gettin' it on.
Has the unashamedly singularitarianistic agenda of Intel of late changed your mind at all, Dale?
They’re all closeted singularitarians over there at Intel, are they? Oh, I see. It just looks like the Robot Cult consists of a few thousand privileged North Atlantic boys with toys who can’t distinguish science from science fiction and pine for robotic techno-transcendence, when instead you throng the labs of consensus science and the boardrooms of high-tech companies thousands upon thousands strong. Well, you guys are all set, then. And I for one welcome our new robotic overlords!
2 comments:
> Has the unashamedly singularitarianistic agenda of Intel of late
> changed your mind at all, Dale?
Is Larrabee gonna light the fuse of the big S?
Oh no, wait -- it'll happen when Google makes the Web wake up
by plugging Larrabee chips into their search engine, right?
Using, um, Wolfram Alpha technology, I guess. Maybe
with Novamente sauce and Numenta sprinkles.
Gah. As someone who actually *is* an engineer, it feels like...some sort of bizarre appropriation when superlatives insist that engineers have their back, so to speak. If there is one thing I've learned from working as an engineer, it's that one has to take extreme care invoking models and cannot rely on them to do one's thinking. Most of the superlative stuff reminds me of a really poorly made circuit simulation program, of the kind that might work on the screen but which would not actually tell you the first thing about building a functional circuit. Like instead of resistors and capacitors and transistors, you'd have blocks with labels like "Nanotechnology".
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