Something for Nick? ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Clinton Ignatov <clintontheg...@gmail.com> Date: Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 1:42 PM Subject: Re: [MEA] Wash. Post op-ed on AI To: <m...@lists.ibiblio.org>
This is in my wheel house, so I'll type up some thoughts here. :) The only sure way to address the mis-attribution of intelligence to machines is to understand machines as machines, which is something we're exactly /not /doing. The opaqueness of proprietary, black-box, consumer-marketed commodity computers has inevitably lead to people only appreciating them /as/ the metaphors which are used to render them familiar. Whereas a metaphor is four parts: a relation of one figure/ground to another, such at A is to B as C is to D, all of the socially-constructed language and terms which are used to discuss computers are flattened two a single gestalt of marketing terms. The high-level interface, or "design" or "user experience" is all that consumers are allowed/encouraged to know or understand or learn. And that's all fictional content, created by digital "artists." The language is so corrupted with illusion and lies that very-few people actually develop the perception necessary to actually physically sense what a computer is and what it's doing in any real sense. People talk about "information processing" as though information were a substance like air or ether or electrons or the 'geist' of the Zeitgeist which "flows" about. Vacuum tube machines and the soldered-together projects you see from photos of the Home Brew Computer Club in the '70s—where Jobs and Wozniak, for instance, brought their first Apple demo—were at least large and slow enough to recognize as completely physical machines. A computer is /completely/ a mechanical chunk of /physical/ matter ka-chunking through various states deterministically in accordance to the logic of the /physical /layout of its parts to the beat of a clock. Nobody would argue that a bunch of tooth-picks on a table rotated about in patterns could think, or talk, or be sentient. But for some-reason you shrink them down and move them really, really fast, and suddenly society starts arguing about toothpick ethics! The unethical thing has been the complete and utter failure at every level of society to maintain the culture of computer education. I grew up in the '90s learning computers wrong owing to the influx of Apple's into the classroom. If my dad hadn't teaching me basic electronics and if I hadn't jumped ship to GNU/Linux on my own, I'd have never, ever learned what computers were as physical devices. It would have otherwise been impossible to escape the absolute sludge of animism and superstition inherent in all the terms used in media and school which reify computer content, "information," into some kind of fifth classical element. I love McLuhan, but the naive application his analogue-era differentiation between electric devices and mechanical devices has done a great disservice to understanding media here. From my reading, electric devices in his sense are communication machines. And, of course, computers have absolutely /nothing/ to do with communications. Any use of computers /for/ communications is entirely a matter of content. Computers existed offline forever, and can and will continue to do so. What computers did was replace buildings full of mathematicians sitting at desks crunching numbers in various businesses and state facilities (i.e. "running the numbers," or processing information) like accountants and statisticians and what-not. The effects of that work are, to my mind, much more in line with the mechanical, typographical world of the Gutenberg era—the world behind McLuhan's Mechanical Bride—than the electric world of the telegraph. It's the /analogue/ world which feels alive and electric, because there was always people on both sides of it. The attribution of consciousness or intelligence to the "spirit of radio" or "life-likeness" of film or gossip-like flow of analogue information across wires may has only been virtualized within computer simulation. And with simulation, there is no longer the guarentee that it's another real human on the other side which was definitely true for a telephone call. That's what feel's "alive" to people: the colourful animations of our high-density, tactile displays and other interfaces which obscure the actual machine. The Turing Test depended entirely on hiding the machine/other person from view behind such an ambiguous interface. All the theoretical conversations in the world about "the nature of intelligence" or whatever are doomed to irrelevancy so-long as people don't begin taking apart their machines, learning their elementary logic gates, and actually building /into their entire body and embodied sensory life/ a /postive/ definition of what computers are. Only then will the metaphorical language we use to discuss computers become again a proper metaphor: the situation being described /by/ the metaphor will be apprehended through it, instead of replaced by it. Clinton ConcernedNetizen.com On 2022-06-19 09:04, jmcdaid wrote: > The authors articulate significant critiques. The paper I was scheduled to deliver next month at MEA (before I freaked out about international travel right now) bears directly on this question, and argues that because of our inbuilt biases toward pattern detection and theory of mind, we have a long history of fooling ourselves like this. > > Applying media ecological analysis and a bit of posthumanism (in particular, Katherine Hayles’ recent work — her suggestion for a better way to categorize ‘intelligent’ systems is “non-conscious cognizers”) would help avoid embarrassing Clever Hans pratfalls. > > For those interested,http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.31499.57125 > --------------------------- > John McDaid > @jmcdaid > johnmcdaid.com > > > > > >> On Jun 19, 2022, at 7:50 AM, Lance Strate<str...@fordham.edu> wrote: >> >> “We warned Google that people might believe AI was sentient. Now it’s >> happening.” Curious as to folk’s views on the controversy? >> >> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/google-ai-ethics-sentient-lemoine-warning/?utm_campaign=wp_week_in_ideas&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_ideas&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F372065c%2F62af021ecfe8a21601b36e70%2F5e76228dade4e21f59d03f70%2F14%2F71%2F62af021ecfe8a21601b36e70&wp_cu=df402a1839eedea70a5234de3acc3622%7CC0D6D858BA704203E0430100007FC096 >> _______________________________________________ >> MEA mailing list >> m...@lists.ibiblio.org >> https://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/mea > _______________________________________________ > MEA mailing list > m...@lists.ibiblio.org > https://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/mea _______________________________________________ MEA mailing list m...@lists.ibiblio.org https://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/mea -- ============================================ Tom Johnson - t...@jtjohnson.com Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA 505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h) ============================================
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