Merritt promptly converts the hypothetical question about salvatin for aliens—which depends, of course, on the assumption that Martians are beings much like ourselves—into: Are you there, God? It’s I, robot.
Artificial Intelligence
Ed Feser on the delusion that computers are intelligent
”As Smith observes, a computer can be programmed to detect instances of the word “betrayal” in scanned texts, but it lacks the concept of betrayal.”
Jonathan Bartlett: Does evolution mean computers will take over?
Elon Musk sees technology as taking over the human world and we’d best consider our options. Ma points out that humans build computers but no computer has ever built a human: For Musk, technology is not a tool to promote humanity. Rather, technology will take humanity’s place of leadership in the world. Humans will have […]
Intelligent design? Ray Kurzweil’s AI-driven Singularity would make the whole universe intelligent
If computers got that smart. Kurzweil’s critics believe that the superintelligent computers he needs can’t exist. If the critics are correct, we have misread the AI revolution.
Computers’ stupidity makes them dangerous
Statistician Gary Smith thinks the real danger today is not that computers are smarter than us, but that we think computers are smarter than us.
Lovelock (now 100 years old): Cyborgs will replace us and treat us like houseplants
Like Darwin’s Ascent of Man, Lovelock’s Ascent of the Cyborgs has no ladder and he doesn’t sense the need for one.
Artificial vs human intelligence: Sabine Hossenfelder offers us 10 differences
As AI types like to say, the system is so easily fooled because it doesn’t “know” anything. We are slowly learning, in consequence, more about what it means for a human being to “know” something.
Do you remember when IBM Watson (Jeopardy winner) was going to revolutionize medicine?
It seems Watson couldn’t determine which medical information was more meaningful than a lot of data in a given situation.
Astronomer Martin Rees on why science is approaching its limits
And how it can transcend them via “intelligent design.” Be warned. In the middle of the bridge to the post-human artificial intelligence future sits a fat troll called the Halting Problem, waiting for an unsuspecting computer idealist to wander by…
Why does an AI pioneer think that Jeopardy winner Watson is a “fraud”?
The famous Jeopardy contest in 2011 worked around the fact that Watson could not grasp the meaning of anything.
Computers can’t think like people; they only do symbolic logic
Engineering prof Karl D. Stephan: Symbolic logic says nothing about the truth or reality of what you give it. To understand what things really are, you have to get outside the pristine mathematical structure of symbolic logic and embrace what Prof. Kreeft calls Socratic logic.
Bob Marks: Bias is inevitable in AI; time to admit it
Marks’s point is that such biases are not a matter of villains taking over. It’s a normal feature of the way people think. And people program computers. Doubtless, it finds its way into evolution issues for which people say they ran a simulation on a computer.
Bob Marks on what happens when people try to write creative computer programs
It seems that the programmer would have to make the computer smarter than he is, which means smarter than itself. That’s a challenge.
Winston Ewert explains why the mind is not a computer
“An abstract mathematical device cannot experience qualia or consciousness. If they could, we would expect mathematical formulas like the quadratic formula or the area of a sphere to experience consciousness. But that seems absurd, so we must conclude that a computer cannot exhibit consciousness. Put another way, consciousness is not a form of computation.”
AI will save Gaia, says James Lovelock at nearly 100 years of age
The Gaia hypothesis started out as science, then discovered weed. But a digital Gaia movement for the 21st century will not, one suspects, be hippies. Maybe not as nice.