Context: How would we know if an AI is conscious? We find ourselves in an intractable ontological (as much as epistemological) bind here. If we ever get to the point of generating autonomous synthetic information-processing systems that tick all the boxes for notionally proving their possession of consciousness by whatever standard metric we might arbitrarily […]
Tag: Artificial Intelligence
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Are Languages Intelligent Entities?
Context: Quick thoughts on GPT3 An aptitude to compose text artefacts without enduring, substantive (or perhaps any) comprehension forms the basis of many of our journeys through educational institutions. In a sense – blind rule-shuffling in context is what is requested of many if not most students in any standardised learning environment. Competency is measured […]
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Chemical Intelligence
Context: Neural network based on autocatalytic reaction performs image classification It really is not much of a hop, skip and jump from all these emerging discoveries of proxy mechanisms for invoking rudimentary machine intelligence to suggest that we have quite profoundly placed the ontological cart before the horse here. Information-processing systems (of which all matter […]
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Is China Taking the Lead in AI?
Context: Is China Taking the Lead in AI? I guess it really depends on what we consider progress to be and in what ways such progress is substantive and meaningful or superficial and fragile. It may be an undeniable fact that competition and adversarial sabre-rattling is as profoundly and normatively written into our modern psyches […]
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COVID’S Metamorphosis, revisited
Context: A Language AI Is Accurately Predicting Covid-19 ‘Escape’ Mutations A fascinating method of discovery. An inference here is that the underlying information and energy-processing characteristics or adaptive, dynamical symmetries of viral RNA and linguistic structure possess a common logical antecedent. We might, indeed, perform such ontological archaeology through or as the indefinitely-extensible “languages” of […]
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On Moral Machines and Embodied Biases
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 […]
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AI: Dispatches from a metal mind
Relatively recent and unexpected career changes have found me up to my armpits in the swiftly-flowing waters and complex technologies of machine learning and artificial intelligence. I am utterly fascinated by the many and diverse ways in which we seek to replicate our own cognition and even while we must at some level know that […]
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Will AI superintelligence be evil?
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, […]
Context: How do you build trust in new technologies? An arguably irreducible factor in this is that cultural, linguistic and (corollary) cognitive systems thrive where and when there is a threshold of uncertainty and doubt. Personal (or national) identities – for instance – are never so certain in their dissimulated security as when they are […]
Professor Bell provides a fascinating, artfully-abbreviated and profoundly well-informed historical survey of the steam, electrical, computational and AI/cyber-physical technological phase transitions of human civilisation. As an anthropologist, she grounds technological systems in the people and places that inhabit them. It is clearly of critical importance to consider the lived experience of a future that remakes us and […]
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Artificial Intelligence as Artist?
Art is nothing without controversy. You might even suggest that the adversarialism and dissonant entropy of disagreement regarding value or aesthetic merit is precisely the primary transmission medium for a hype and cultural salience by and through which art maintains sustainable continuity in the popular imagination and marketplace of cultural concepts. Is it art? Is […]
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Who’s afraid of the big bad AI?
Artificial Intelligence technologies raise (or revisit) enduring philosophical questions regarding the relationships between notions of individuality, self-determination and distributed information systems (as language, culture, technology, civilisation) in which such concepts acquire meaning. The gathering stormclouds of technologically-mediated identity-harvesting, surveillance and (emerging artefacts, idioms and tools of) ideological control suggest that we do not understand and […]
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