A GHOST IN THE ALGORITHM (original) (raw)
Related papers
◾ Singularity, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Artificial Intelligence
2016
Professor Stephen Hawking recently warned about the growing power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to imbue robots with the ability to both replicate themselves and to increase the rate at which they get smarter-leading to a tipping point or 'technological singularity' when they can outsmart humans. In this chapter I will argue that Hawking is essentially correct to flag up an existential danger surrounding widespread deployment of 'autonomous machines', but wrong to be so concerned about the singularity, wherein advances in AI effectively makes the human race redundant; in my world AI-with humans in the loop-may yet be a force for good.
If we look back 50 years in computing history, we can compare Vannevar Bush's vision of what information technology might one day be able to accomplish to what it has since become. Bush foresaw the use of the computer as an effective memory system, with which humans could store and retrieve information, as well as sort data, and trace a kind of hyperlink trail of reasoning. Not only that, but in Bush's memex machine, one would even be able to print off or magnetically store an information set for delivery to others. Everything Bush described has come to pass, and in nearly every case exceeds what he imagined. Bush was prescient indeed, but he also occupied a good vantage point: he directed certain military research in the war effort. He was familiar with rapid developments in prototype feedback experiments such as fire control and communications theory, among other things. In early fire control a system's state advanced through iterative looping of feedback through the system. Output was re-entered as input. Refinements in such processes led to the birth of cybernetics. In this phase of the information revolution cybernetic systems combined machines doing environmental scanning with human intervention providing the intentionality, or wisdom, to the system. Machines appeared fully capable of combining data structures into information constructs. Information domains were defined by task.
2021
Over the past 20 years, the idea of singularity has become increasingly important to the technological visions of posthumanism and transhumanism. The article first introduces key posthumanist authors such as Marvin Minsky, Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, and Frank Tipler. In the following, the concept of singularity is reviewed from a cultural studies perspective, first with regard to the cosmological singularity and then to the technological singularity. According to posthumanist thinkers the singularity is marked by the emergence of a superhuman computer intelligence that will solve all of humanity's problems. At the same time, it heralds the end of the human era. Most authors refer to the British mathematician Irving John Good's 1965 essay Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine as the originator of the idea of superintelligence. Individual elements of the singularity idea such as the impenetrable event horizon, the frontier and the ongoing acceleration of progress are contextualized historically and culturally.
Review of: "[Essay] The Algorithm; Mind of a Virtual Era – Our Code of Codes
Anna Aragno's work sounds like an appeal, an SOS to raise awareness of the issues of Anthropocene change (Haraway, 2016). Are we all in danger of turning ourselves into machines? Is there still something that can resist this process that drives us into the Post-Human (Braidotti, 2019)? There would be humanistic culture to act as a point of resistance, if it
i live between virtual and real, absorbed by networks. never really belonging to any of these realities, i become like a ghost myself. the accessibility of information and its omnipresence excludes the need for physical bodies. a space of distraction is where i breathe, never really being alone and at the same time never really together with somebody. i become a version of myself that I don't recognize. other desires, other identities, other way of thinking, alien to me; the experience of something other that surfs along technological surfaces searching for reciprocity, because it is the closest thing it relates to. do i become a ghost in the hardware?
'Tis Twenty Twenty-Three—and Techno-Fascist Singularity Is Here
Interrogating AI: The Promise, the Problems, the Future (Cognitive, Engineering, Psychological, Philosophical, Consciousness, and Science-Fictional Perspectives), edited by Alex S. Kohav, 2024
Few would argue against the assertion that today we have become a technological society. This essay endeavors to unpack the meaning and some of the consequences of this observable fact. First, the traditional division of the human self into an inner domain and an outer persona is now more and more heavily weighted toward the latter. The mind’s very interiority and subjectivity—privacy—is now being breached daily, routinely, and effortlessly by AI-enabled devices, amounting to a tyrannical manipulation of broad populations. The techno-fascist singularity has arrived. Second, the “posthuman” cyborgs are being applauded as the coming “overhuman” by some, who echo the early fascists and futurists, such as Marinetti, who celebrated the “beauty of speed” and machinery’s superiority to human capabilities. Third, technology’s emphasis on purposefulness and functionality, with their resultant “skewed sample of the events of the total mind” (Bateson), distorts our grasp of reality. The schema outlined by Rousseau and elaborated by Derrida—stretching from gods (or kings) to beasts or cattle, with human beings somewhere in the middle—is now tasked with accommodating AI-powered robots, too. Are robots going to be more like cattle or, perhaps, akin to gods? That robots can’t be human, the chapter argues, can be surmised from that which is impossible for AI-driven robots to attain: consciousness. The chapter further explores the intimate connection between AI and both psychology and cognitive science, identifying cognition as the foundation underlying the notion of intelligence in all three of these domains. Yet such an intelligence, being devoid of consciousness and relying on algorithms to achieve superior cognition, information processing speeds, and virtually unlimited working memory, cannot possibly engage in real thinking predicated on something other than algorithms or swift decisiveness. Since the overarching aims of cognition and AI alike are achievements of specific goals—among them survival and the thriving of the agent doing the cognizing—the relegating of humans to the status of cattle seems inevitable.
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2018), 2018
The influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (ALife) technologies upon society, and their potential to fundamentally shape the future evolution of humankind, are topics very much at the forefront of current scientific, governmental and public debate. While these might seem like very modern concerns, they have a long history that is often disregarded in contemporary discourse. Insofar as current debates do acknowledge the history of these ideas, they rarely look back further than the origin of the modern digital computer age in the 1940s–50s. In this paper we explore the earlier history of these concepts. We focus in particular on the idea of self-reproducing and evolving machines, and potential implications for our own species. We show that discussion of these topics arose in the 1860s, within a decade of the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species, and attracted increasing interest from scientists, novelists and the general public in the early 1900s. After introducing the relevant work from this period, we categorise the various visions presented by these authors of the future implications of evolving machines for humanity. We suggest that current debates on the co-evolution of society and technology can be enriched by a proper appreciation of the long history of the ideas involved.
Can Computers Become Conscious, an Essential Condition for the Singularity
Given that consciousness is an essential ingredient for achieving Singularity, the notion that an Artificial General Intelligence device can exceed the intelligence of a human, namely, the question of whether a computer can achieve consciousness, is explored. Given that consciousness is being aware of one's perceptions and/or of one's thoughts, it is claimed that computers cannot experience consciousness. Given that it has no sensorium, it cannot have perceptions. In terms of being aware of its thoughts it is argued that being aware of one's thoughts is basically listening to one's own internal speech. A computer has no emotions, and hence, no desire to communicate, and without the ability, and/or desire to communicate, it has no internal voice to listen to and hence cannot be aware of its thoughts. In fact, it has no thoughts, because it has no sense of self and thinking is about preserving one's self. Emotions have a positive effect on the reasoning powers of humans, and therefore, the computer's lack of emotions is another reason for why computers could never achieve the level of intelligence that a human can, at least, at the current level of the development of computer technology.
Our natural relation with the Artificial Intelligence and the Complexity of Evolution
2018
The evolution of the Human-Technology interaction is accelerating in an exponential growth pattern; everyday, new hardware solutions related with Brain Computer Interface, Internet of Things, Virtual/Augmented Reality and other devices can enhance bodies and minds quantifying information of the environment to sustain mixed realities; the implementation of new paradigms, models and methodologies in software development and many other engineering advances allows the creation of personal assistants, autonomous agents and cognitive computing based on: machine representation and deep learning algorithms, powered by cloud computing platforms over distributed layers; according to the trends, Artificial Intelligence will be the most important tool of humanity and probably our last invention, even if we could mitigate all the risks associated including human stupidity itself; AI could effectively be the new electricity when contemporary and new approaches like meta and reinforcement learning will be executed in a fast and scalable network using more processing power than the popular binary computing available now. The main intention of this essay is to share the experiences and perspectives of a researcher and a software developer following the philosophic path of the transhumanism and exploring some of the building blocks of AI with a singular vision about a positive future with abundance for everyone.