Context: The Appearance of Robots Affects Our Perception of the Morality of Their Decisions Curious: “People consider moral decisions made by humanoid robots to be less ethically sound than when another human or traditional-looking robot makes the same decision.” The uncanny valley rides again. This is a particular instance of a general principle. The apperception […]
The question might be not as to if or when General AI successfully transcends human intellect, but rather – what is it about the culture, competition and commercial (or, to be frank, geostrategic and complex adversarial) contexts in which these technologies currently effervesce and thrive that might only ever guarantee that they are shaped from, […]
An interesting consequence of generalised attributions of human exceptionalism is that we tend to automatically believe that all intelligence, all value and all experience exist (and persist) in this diminutive cranial cavity we inhabit. Cogito ergo something is definitely going on between our ears but there is a deep and irreducible mystery at work (i.e. […]
We are (all) still attempting to brute-force our way towards Artificial General Intelligence. If the complexity sciences have taught us anything it is that there is an autonomous orientation within naturally-occurring information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems towards self-organisation and bootstrapped system optimisation via logical extensibility and recursive exponentiation. We appear to be attempting to […]
In the search for knowledge and wisdom it is very often what is hidden that is more useful than what is revealed. While we value what we understand and what utility we might obtain from it, the vast and plausible infinity of that which we do not (and can never) know is the defining logical […]
What is perhaps most disturbing about the artival of autonomous systems and AI is not the plausible inevitability of monumental vocational disruption; it is that there are so few ongoing or persistent, well-informed and broadly-accessible public and (non-partisan) political discussions regarding the extent to which these upheavals will reshape entire economic, social and cultural value […]
What differentiates reasoning from algorithmic procedure and computation? Does reasoning suggest comprehension, agency, subjectivity or is it just a complex sequence and integrated, autonomously self-propagating network and goal-directed pattern of blind mechanism and self-inflected logic? If reasoning is really just complex algorithm, and if the treasured concepts of our own embodied knowledge and experience are […]
A philosophical perspective: I accept that conscious machines are plausible, but I have trouble believing that the diverse algorithmic and networked approaches under development are anything beyond sophisticated, limited, mechanical or incomplete axiomatic models. It provides reflexive psychological comfort to assert (and believe) that the hard problem of consciousness is explicable via a reductive algebra […]
We build machines to define ourselves but in neither do we find the certainty or the completeness we seek.
To brain or not to brain, that is the question…
Most narratives of post-AI apocalypse fail to acknowledge that whatever it is that is going on between all of our ears might actually represent a resource or asset of study and creative experimentation for an artificial superintelligence.
What does an attempt to generate an artificially intelligent Theory of Mind (of the existence of intentions, experiences and inference of probable future actions) in other entities reveal about our own existential circumstances and the fundamental uncertainties of our own experience ?
