From "To A.I. Executives, We’re All Just 'Meat Computers'/A term first used in philosophy and cognitive science circles has lately taken on a more ominous cast. Moo" (NYT).
The article is about the use of the term "meat computers" to refer to human beings. The story that's quoted, from 1991, by Terry Bisson, is "They’re Made Out of Meat."
Posts
32 comments:
Also this weekend, WaPo wants you to believe eating meat increases the chances of colorectal cancer. Maybe WaPo doesn't hire meat computers.
I was a big fan of the Meat Puppets. If they hadn't been such druggies, they might have been a big success.
If a brain is a meat computer, it is a piece of very soggy extra prime meat. The human brain is 80% water, heavily larded with 12% fat and only 6% protein. The remaining 2% is carbohydrates and a pinch of salts. So let's not call the brain a meat computer. Let's go with, say, a very dirty aquarium that has had a stick of butter and spoonful of sugar dropped in it. I also think that description better explains the way most people think.
Meat? Like in the Twilight Zone "To serve man"?
The article is about the use of the term "meat computers" to refer to human beings.
Archie Bunker made a similar observation.
It's as if mind–body dualism is in the rearview mirror getting smaller and smaller.
They ignore the Soul which a computer cant recreate
People are Soylent Green
We used to refer to "meatspace" all the time in one of my previous jobs. Brain as thinking meat is nor far from that.
I don't see it much these days but back in the 90s real life, as opposed to internet life, used to be Calle "meatspace"
John Henry
Just wait till they find out about p-zombies
I see Joe beat me to it.
GMTA
John Henry
Like most young men, I was doing most of my thinking with the wrong meat.
The robot Bender on "Futurama" pejoratively referred to humans as 'meatbags'.
The meat computer has a lot of bugs and glitches, as demonstrated by this wonderful story, which was the first to pop up on my feeds today:
"Houston Attorney Charged with Felony Bestiality After Wife Catches Him RAPING the Family Dog on Hidden Surveillance Camera"
How managers think: Engineers are more productive? I can fire half of them!
How Engineers think: Engineers are more productive. Hire more engineers because they are worth more.
Does the wife share any responsibility for this?
Altman might be a cyborg zuckerberg too
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes (the ‘Nasty, Brutish, and Short’ State of Nature guy) argued famously against René Descartes’s separation of mind and body. While Descartes posited "I think, therefore I am", Hobbes counter-posited: "I think, therefore matter thinks."
The term used to be "wetware" in contrast to hardware and software. In some places it may still be.
“The article is about the use of the term "meat computers" to refer to human beings.”
We’re a lot more meat than computer. Which is why it makes sense to replace us with AI. Why support all that useless gooey stuff when you just want to shuffle some bits around.
Someone made a great short video from that short story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg
" a very dirty aquarium that has had a stick of butter and spoonful of sugar dropped in it" would be a great masthead motto. CC, JSM
Bro science says we lack free will, therefore we are actually meat puppets
Gulistan said...
"Someone made a great short video from that short story:"
Hey, it's the Cash Cab guy!
I just flattened out the tools for the agents and divided them into tool packages for types of work but my interface-root.agents directions node still had the tiered hierarchy of the old model.
I thought that I had already updated the agent directions in the tree.jsonl. But I was wrong. Did I hallucinate that completion? Either way my electronic memory was correct so I "remembered" I need to do that work.
I was able to go back the the design documentation and discussions I had for designing and implementing the new .agents branch 45 minutes ago. now the agents. are being rebuilt to integrate with the new tool sets and the cloud buffer and completion reporting are being simplified and squashed.
It is the memory improvement that I think is the most valuable part of this integration.
blogger's tag management is the worst
Anthropogenic Intelligence
@Lazarus --
Yes, the notion of humans as wetware dates back to at least the 1980s.
Within cognitive research, the metaphor that computers were "thinking machines" was used to describe early AI. Also see every giant flashing-lights computer brain device of 1960s and 1970s film. There was even a "Thinking Machines Corporation" supercomputer and AI firm of 1983:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation
Every generation thinks they invented sex and philosophy.
What the hell are the aliens made of?
Our brains are stupendously remarkable organs. What difference does it make if they are made of the same stuff as animals? It's like sayin g that supercomputers are made of metal. So what?
Science does not, cannot, discern origin and expression.
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 4 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.