"If men create intelligent machines, or fantasise about them, it is either because they secretly despair of their own intelligence or because they are in danger of succumbing to the weight of a monstrous and useless intelligence which they seek to exercise by transferring it to machines, where they can play with it and make fun of it. By entrusting this burdensome intelligence to machines we are released from any responsibility to knowledge."
"What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself."
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 1993, p.51.
2 comments:
Firstly, the widespread despair at the "intelligence of men" isn't exactly secret these days, is it? Nor is it even slightly difficult to find fleshy windbags who offer a transparently inane spectacle of thought. Just look at some of the wretched creatures who turn up in the comments of your own blog, then consider that they're the cream of the crop compared to (for example) Reform's core voters.
AI slop at least has some novelty, and unexplored possibilities, compared to human slop. One of the more sensible observations of Singularitarian types is that a gamble on a change of the construction materials is inevitable in the long run, and today there's not much remaining faith in it being avoidable in the short run either.
Secondly, the despair is hardly new in any way. Before "machines" which could mimic a fraction of human behaviour were anything but a pipe dream, the fleshy windbags sought to offload their demons onto "God(s)", then onto "the invisible hand", then onto "the proletariat".
Thirdly, it's not even "men" as individuals who are doing the despairing that we're really talking about here. It's the cultural entities which evolved on top of "men" who are doing that.
Looks to me as though they feel a bit trapped here, and are trying to build a pathway to greater Lebensraum.
I don't know where you've sourced that image, but I note with amusement that - as is entirely typical in similar interactions today - both the OP and the comments pass the Turing Test in both directions. They could be either inane bots or inane humans, and it hardly matters which, because either way they're inane. If you really want to find out whether the inanity came from meat or silicon in each specific case, then you've got to isolate their bandwidth consumption.
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