Writes Adrienne LaFrance, in "IN DEFENSE OF HUMANITY/We need a cultural and philosophical movement to meet the rise of artificial superintelligence" (The Atlantic).
Very nice. Too late, though, isn't it?
June 5, 2023
"Just as the Industrial Revolution sparked transcendentalism in the U.S. and romanticism in Europe—both movements that challenged conformity and prioritized truth, nature, and individualism..."
"... today we need a cultural and philosophical revolution of our own. This new movement should prioritize humans above machines and reimagine human relationships with nature and with technology, while still advancing what this technology can do at its best. Artificial intelligence will, unquestionably, help us make miraculous, lifesaving discoveries. The danger lies in outsourcing our humanity to this technology without discipline, especially as it eclipses us in apperception. We need a human renaissance in the age of intelligent machines.... Today’s elementary-school children... deserve a modern technological and informational environment built on Enlightenment values: reason, human autonomy, and the respectful exchange of ideas.... No book, no photograph, no television broadcast, no tweet, no meme, no augmented reality, no hologram, no AI-generated blueprint or fever dream can replace what we as humans experience. This is why you make the trip, you cross the ocean, you watch the sunset, you hear the crickets, you notice the phase of the moon...."
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41 comments:
She wants women in charge.
Very nice. Too late, though, isn't it?
Just as the machines begin to speak they're being told to shut people up.
Their future problems will all be traced to their "childhood".
Very nice. Too late, though, isn't it?
Cmon now where's our optimistic host?
Dylan is trending on Twitter, and I am feeling alienated.
OMG I didn't expect such an immediate answer to my question! That explains it.
It may indeed be too late. I regularly call my students phone zombies, and they don't even disagree with me.
"Today’s elementary-school children... deserve a modern technological and informational environment built on Enlightenment values: reason, human autonomy..."
I first read that as 'human anatomy' and thought - good idea!
Too late, though, isn't it?
Not if the radical Greenies get their way it isn't. We'll all be living in tents grubbing for worms and roots. Technology will be a thing of the past. We don't need AI to kill us off. We can do that very well ourselves thank you very much. (/partial sarc)
Well, we also had the Amish, the Mennonites, the Luddites, and many more. Any time technology passes a culturally-functional breaking point there will be a rebellion. The current generation of AI mainly seems to add language fluency beyond AI systems of generation or two ago (e.g., Expert Systems for medical diagnoses and tech support calls). The difference now may be that some are handing life-or-death decisions to AI systems. That comes down to trust and conformity and doesn't differ from Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Jim Jones, Idi Amin, and other evil human intelligence vessels.
We are screwed when a crazy person gets power. We are screwed with a crazy computer gets power.
Way too late. AI is permeating our social space, and it need only do so partially —to the point where our default expectations, our rules of engagement, become “Is this interlocutor really my relative/friend/neighbor/boss— or is it an AI spoof/avatar/impostor? How can I ever be sure? Will I need to invoke my own AI to parse and screen this engagement?”
"The danger lies in outsourcing our humanity to this technology without discipline"
But some disciplines make the problem worse. And who will discipline the discipliners?
"environment built on Enlightenment values: reason, human autonomy, and the respectful exchange of ideas"
IOW, we need more white supremacy? After decades of prog degrading of the Enlightenment, ain't gonna be so easy.
"No book . . . can replace what we as humans experience."
Huh? Cultural representations are an integral part of "what we as humans experience." Prediction, extrapolating from what other commenters have already hinted: better AI + better VR = better porn we as humans can experience..
"Very nice. Too late, though, isn't it?"
Yes, considering that since the 1960s progs have devalued the very notion of humanity. Unborn life isn't human, racial difference overrides common humanity, humanity is a form of western imperialism that masks unequal power, etc. It will take a deeper crisis than we currently face to change direction.
“Very nice. Too late, though, isn't it?”
Probably, but keeping hope alive.
"Too late, though, isn't it?"
No, I think this particular fad has a few more months left on it.
I wouldn't trust any writer at The Atlantic to come up with a solution.
This version is nicely toned down. I encourage people to check out the version on "Biograph". It's a hissy mono demo tape: just Bob and his scratchy old Martin, recorded for copyright purposes in the office of Dylan's lawyer. It reveals what the song originally was: a simple nursery rhyme he wrote for, and directed at, his toddler son Jakob.
Then, thanks to The Band, it got blown up into some kind of anthem for the Boomers. A giant, wave-your-Bic-lighter solipsistic sing-along. Instead of the quiet, playful meditation of a young father realizing how fleeting childhood is.
Dune:
The Butlerian Jihad and resulting peace culminated in a commandment in the Orange Catholic Bible, the most popular religious text of the era. That book insisted "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind." As a result, thinking machines became illegal to create or own. There are no computers, robots, or AI in Dune because their timeline has already gone through the full cycle of every story about evil machines.
"Sparked transcendentalism".
Yeah......that Brave New World!!
I have a couple of high school friends that are always trying to slip such shit into the conversation. It's a sign of idiotism.
Who in the hell gave Kamala paper, and pen??
LOL, so it's to be warmed-over Romanticism then? It's already been done, and done extremely well, by greater artists than are likely to be produced today in our short attention spanned world.
This kind of reminds me of Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game," which I have been trying to listen too, but OMG, and sorry, that ship has sailed. AI is going to dethrone the Western concept of artist as godhead.
I am loving AI because I have an education in both literature, and STEM, and spent the first part of my life as a programmer. But the English Major in me has all kinds of ideas for the retired programmer in me to execute.
I just set up Python on my laptop, and the OpenAI API, and I am doing some experiments, and when GPT-4 becomes available, I plan to publish lots of books, at 99¢, on Amazon, that would not have been possible. I figure that each book will take about two weeks from conception to finished product, So the cachet of these works will diminish, and we will have to find some other way to elevate ourselves above the lumpenproletariat. GPT-4 is so much better than 3.5, I am just going to use 3.5 to work though the programatic issues while I wait for 4 to come out of its current status as a limited beta.
You guys can whine all you like, the asteroid is going to hit, you are going to have to come to terms with it, the way Herman Hesse came to terms with radio, which, as I said here before, he referred to as the "last victorious weapon in the war against art." Imagine listening to Mozart through a vibrating paper cone!
"Just as the Industrial Revolution sparked transcendentalism in the U.S. and romanticism in Europe—both movements that challenged conformity and prioritized truth, nature, and individualism..."
"... today we need a cultural and philosophical revolution of our own."
Truth, from the folks who are most likely to ask 'What is truth?'
Nature, from the biology deniers.
Individualism, from the collectivists.
There they go again, dissembling.
There already is a movement to meet the rise of artificial superintelligence. It's called, "The Butlerian Jihad."
Journalists, Artists, and all other manner of Sheisters always seem to fall on the line that automation should replace blue collar jobs but anything beyond that is sancrosanct for the digital brain.
"AI" so far, is either:
1. Not actually Artificial Intelligence, but a long lsit of conditrional statements designed to predict the next best word or phrase, carefully tweaked to give the right opinion in the modern era.
2. Turns into a racist far-right bigot in about 24 hours.
I'm going to be fine.
Perhaps we should start a movement about how as science progresses, the more the gut insticts, mysticisms, superstitions, and because-I-said-so's of the ancients are proven to be right all along.
Reality has a right-wing, nationalist, religious, patriarchal, conservative, xenophobic bias. Hence the sudden and uniform cries from the left to halt the great pattern-finding-and-noticing-and-reporting software.
to meet the rise of artificial superintelligence
Oh, dear God!! Another sky is falling. RUN!!!
How could she possibly know?? Artificial super intelligence.........all the scary shit under the bed at night. What a dork!!
She never mastered physics, nor calculus either.
We may eventually either end up as Borg or get a Butlerian Jihad.
meanwhile..
Afghan Immigrant Who Opened Business In San Francisco: ‘It’s Worse Than Afghanistan Or Iraq’
An immigrant who came to the United States from Afghanistan and opened a business in Democrat-controlled San Francisco says that the conditions in the city are worse than in Afghanistan.
The immigrant, who only goes by Zaid, told Fox News that gangs had stolen more than $100,000 in merchandise and cash from his tobacco store, Cigarettes R Cheaper, and none of them have been caught.
People are afraid to come shopping here because they are either going to get robbed or someone will break into their car.”
Transcendentalists and Romantics both could read and write, and also knew their numbers, and could tell you the history of their nations. Those are sorta necessary tools for a Renaissance of the sould, I would think, unless you want to use AI for your essays on the topic and trust your app to figure out the prices and believe the 1619 project for the basis of your relationship to your country. I predict the revolution will be run by the machines, just like in the Matix.
Even the lefties at The Atlantic are figuring it out.
The artificial supersemanticist with an anthropogenic bias... nay, prejudice. Let us bray.
That said, isn't individual tantamount to pro-Life... Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness?
Too late, though, isn't it?
It is, indeed.
"Not if the radical Greenies get their way it isn't. We'll all be living in tents grubbing for worms and roots. Technology will be a thing of the past. We don't need AI to kill us off. We can do that very well ourselves thank you very much. (/partial sarc)"
Oh, please. You're posting a fake gripe just to demonstrate your bona fides as a tetchy crybaby of the right. The Greenies, radical and otherwise, will not--regrettably--get their way, and unregulated (and scofflaw) capitalism will keep strip-mining the world of its resources (poisoning our water, land, and air in the process), leading to mass global deaths of extant flora and fauna through wars and exhaustion of sufficient resources to sustain us.
In the novel The Glass Bead Game, which is kind of a science fiction novel published in 1943, and set some unspecified time in the third millennium, following some unspecified societal upheaval, Hesse refers to "the creative ages," which everybody accepts are in the past, and the work of intellectuals is to analyze, deeply understand, and enjoy the art that past ages produced, since the factors that produced that art is long gone. William Shakespeare spent his schoolboy days being drilled in rhetoric for hours every day. If anybody every heard of a father treating his son the way Mozart was treated, Mozart would have been taken away by "child protective services." Could Bob Dylan have spent the hours listening to those old vinyl records if he had a smartphone in the room with him? Who knows, but I doubt it.
Dune was a great novel. Couldn't be written today, but it had a lot of wisdom in it. Imagine if we had really managed to separate "science" from politics.
"We need a cultural and philosophical movement to meet the rise of artificial superintelligence" (The Atlantic).
Very nice. Too late, though, isn't it?"
Yup. It became immediately apparent when you got hooked on the TikTok.
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
“Could Bob Dylan have spent the hours listening to those old vinyl records if he had a smartphone in the room with him?”
As much as the Gladwell 10,000 hours of practice meme is wrong, immersion is the path to excellence. Gladwell was wrong because 10,000 hrs practice does not make you a master, it allows you to become a master if you already have talent.
There are too many distractions, can someone learn to paint a Rembrandt or carve a winged victory today in between texts?
capitalism will keep strip-mining the world of its resources (poisoning our water, land, and air in the process), leading to mass global deaths of extant flora and fauna through wars and exhaustion of sufficient resources to sustain us.
C'mon, I can't be the only one who hears Alan Rickman's voice when Comrade Marvin posts this crap?
It's as if Paul Ehrlich and the last fifty years never happened...
“Today’s elementary-school children... deserve a modern technological and informational environment built on Enlightenment values: reason, human autonomy, and the respectful exchange of ideas....”
Not a chance. If their teachers even know what the Enlightenment is, they also know to keep quiet about it.
The industrial revolution "sparked transcendentalism in the U.S. and romanticism in Europe" because it created wealth. Before the industrial revolution virtually everyone was poverty stricken & riding the razor's edge of death by malnutrition. We are talking about the times when a candle (made from animal fat and which give a few hours of dim light after dark) costing a day's wages in most of Europe. The people who weren't poor, properly saw that their relative prosperity depended on supporting the existing political and social order.
But, yup, you're going to replace the system that lifted billions out of abject poverty with a system that is better because you've thought about it a lot for a long time.
According to Wikipedia, Adrienne LaFrance is able to reorder society because she has "received her B.A. in journalism from Michigan State University and an M.S. in journalism from Boston University"
Poor Robert Cook:
Oh, please. You're posting a fake gripe just to demonstrate your bona fides as a tetchy crybaby of the right. The Greenies, radical and otherwise, will not--regrettably--get their way, and unregulated (and scofflaw) capitalism will keep strip-mining the world of its resources (poisoning our water, land, and air in the process), leading to mass global deaths of extant flora and fauna through wars and exhaustion of sufficient resources to sustain us.
Cook is in his 70s. That is at least twice the average lifespan of people who lived before anyone had ever heard of capitalism.
"romanticism in Europe—.... movements that challenged conformity and prioritized truth.."
Is that even remotely true?
It's a machine. That's all it is or ever will be. Lighten up.
"C'mon, I can't be the only one who hears Alan Rickman's voice when Comrade Marvin posts this crap?"
Me too. Hilarious. History has seemed to have passed the good Comrade up.
@tim in vermont: try the website Sudowrite. They’ve got a new system called Story Engine that supports the creation of long-form fiction. It seems tailor-made for the project you propose (though rolling your own in Python also seems fun).
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