Just a note: A short piece of mine on AI has appeared today on the site of IAI News, which is associated with the biannual How the Light Gets In festival.
Very timely. I watched a YouTube video yesterday where an NBC journalist was showcasing a lab that showed a stimulus (four sequential images of a girl knocked down by a dragons tail) to a person. An AI, then, somewhat successfully processed the brain’s electrical responses to the stimulus and spat out something about seeing a girl be hit and knocked down. I, being the meat machine that I am, was quick in allowing myself to, once again, be fed a large spoonful of meaninglessness and wonder if the computers have us all figured out and if that’s all there is to humanity. Your recent Narcissus letter and this are invigorating reminders that experience is irreducible, imitations are not the same as the thing itself, and that it is precisely because one holds to reductive presuppositions that we think of ourselves as nothing more than machines.
Bought The Master and His Emissary after your conversation with Iain McGilchrist mainly because my theologian wife does not want me reading her books at lunch and getting them stained with salsa thumbprints or whatnot. Very good, though I am getting a bit too hyperaware of my brain.
Very timely. I watched a YouTube video yesterday where an NBC journalist was showcasing a lab that showed a stimulus (four sequential images of a girl knocked down by a dragons tail) to a person. An AI, then, somewhat successfully processed the brain’s electrical responses to the stimulus and spat out something about seeing a girl be hit and knocked down. I, being the meat machine that I am, was quick in allowing myself to, once again, be fed a large spoonful of meaninglessness and wonder if the computers have us all figured out and if that’s all there is to humanity. Your recent Narcissus letter and this are invigorating reminders that experience is irreducible, imitations are not the same as the thing itself, and that it is precisely because one holds to reductive presuppositions that we think of ourselves as nothing more than machines.
Bought The Master and His Emissary after your conversation with Iain McGilchrist mainly because my theologian wife does not want me reading her books at lunch and getting them stained with salsa thumbprints or whatnot. Very good, though I am getting a bit too hyperaware of my brain.