As Nicolás Gómez Dávila said (more or less): The modern man indulge itself thinking that he is a mechanism, but protest loudly when he is treated as such.
2014-11-15 18:39 GMT+01:00, [email protected] <[email protected]>: > I know this comes up a lot, so there's a risk this guy isn't saying > anything new here, but I browsed and decided to view the video and thought > I'd throw it out in case anyone else wants to enter that process. > > Here's the first few paragraphs, linke at bottom. Edge basically. > > *THE MYTH OF AI* > > A lot of us were appalled a few years ago when the American Supreme Court > decided, out of the blue, to decide a question it hadn't been asked to > decide, and declare that corporations are people. That's a cover for making > > it easier for big money to have an influence in politics. But there's > another angle to it, which I don't think has been considered as much: the > tech companies, which are becoming the most profitable, the fastest rising, > > the richest companies, with the most cash on hand, are essentially people > for a different reason than that. They might be people because the Supreme > Court said so, but they're essentially algorithms. > > If you look at a company like Google or Amazon and many others, they do a > little bit of device manufacture, but the only reason they do is to create > a channel between people and algorithms. And the algorithms run on these > big cloud computer facilities. > > The distinction between a corporation and an algorithm is fading. Does that > > make an algorithm a person? Here we have this interesting confluence > between two totally different worlds. We have the world of money and > politics and the so-called conservative Supreme Court, with this other > world of what we can call artificial intelligence, which is a movement > within the technical culture to find an equivalence between computers and > people. In both cases, there's an intellectual tradition that goes back > many decades. Previously they'd been separated; they'd been worlds apart. > Now, suddenly they've been intertwined. > > The idea that computers are people has a long and storied history. It goes > back to the very origins of computers, and even from before. There's always > > been a question about whether a program is something alive or not since it > intrinsically has some kind of autonomy at the very least, or it wouldn't > be a program. There has been a domineering subculture—that's been the most > wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world—that > for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there's an equivalence > between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a > historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be > smarter and better than us and will take over from us > > http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- Alberto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
