> dmb says: > Along the same lines, Hubert Dreyfus says that artificial intelligence will never work. He teaches Heidegger at Berkeley now, but started out in the sciences at MIT. He has the very tough job of trying to explain to the IT community that they are working with certain metaphysical assumptions that lead them to error. He uses Heidegger to explain what they don't know about human cognition. I think this is similar to Pirsig's polite comment about the possibility of thinking machines. He said something like, well if computers could respond to DQ it would be possible to have a machine that can genuinely think. Its my impression that the "if" here is insurmountable. Computers can't respond to DQ and I think they can't for very much the same reasons Dreyfus comes up with in his work on Heidegger. You know, that whole being-in-the-world thing is unknown to the IT guys. They're typical SOM scientists. If anybody I know would be interested in that issue, it would be you, Ian. You and Mr. Google can take it form here.
[IG] Agreed - AI "will never work" until it is realised that life has to evolve before intelligence .... and then it's not artificial any more, simply real. Of course plenty of "IT" people do see that ... the enlightened ones ... so your generalization is a bit swingeing. Most people in the world (but not all) are working under metaphysical illusions - that their SOMist ontologies are concrete and real, etc - whether they are in IT or science or wherever. That's where I take the "cultural ill" view. But I get where you're coming from - you bet I'm interested.. [Krimel] I would say it is way to early do discount AI. Moore's law is still ticking away and machine capacities continue to accelerate. It is impossible to say what capabilities inorganic intelligences will have in 20 or 30 years much less 100 years. Aside from that machines don't even need to think for themselves for artificially intelligent creatures to exist. The use of a computer artificially enhances your intelligence. If nothing else it vastly improves your ability to store and retrieve information. It gives you access to the shared memory of others. It extends the range of your senses allowing you to see and hear others who are a world away or out in space. You have a live bird's eye view of weather from satellites orbit. We have met the AIs and they are us. [dmb] Basically, its an over-extension of logic and a blindness to a certain dimension. There's a sort of brittle, rigid and shallow way of thinking that also happens to be oblivious to its own limitations. That's how we get mathematical analysis of ethics and the attempt to make machines think. A robot like Data (Star Trek: Next Generation) because even if he was programed with every fact in the universe, he'd never know which facts to value or which facts matter and why. It'd be a case of autism on steroids, much worse than the misunderstandings we saw on the show. [Krimel] As it turns out Mr. Data was declared to be an autonomous individual but not a full sentient being. This prevented him from being declared Starfleet property and afforded him certain legal rights. But it is ridiculous to assume that philosophical analysis can declare anything to be technologically impossible. [dmb] And there will never be a transporter like they have on Star Trek either. Its impossible for the same reason. [Krimel] The idea behind the transporter is that the machine can read, store and transmit highly complex patterns. The holodecks and replicators operate of a similar principle in that they can reproduce stored patterns. It would seem to me this emphasis on pattern recognition and replication it right in tune with the MoQ. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
