December 12, 2020introduction
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In the summer of 1956, Dartmouth College held its first Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence to discuss developments in a new field called (and there coined) “artificial intelligence.” But, the idea of thinking mechanical agents was made clear in earlier texts such as Alan Turing’s seminal work Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), and even as early as 1637, when Descartes implied a requirement for some test by which we may distinguish between humans and machines that act human-like. Even further, Rabbi Daniel Nevins illustrates how the ancient folkloric notion of a golem can be interpreted as a theoretical creature with some sort of artificial (limited) intelligence. Ostensibly, AI is an old compelling idea, and it goes by many names and forms, so pinning down a useful comprehensive definition is an increasingly difficult task.
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June 13, 2021 motivation
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Daily human life is becoming increasingly intertwined with algorithms. The people who develop these algorithms (and, to a lesser extent, the implicit users of these algorithms — the general public) can only use their native languages to describe algorithmic nature and activity. E.g., “Netflix is recommending this movie to me”, “my Tesla is looking ahead to find obstructions blocking our path”, or “the software loading wheel indicates the computer is thinking”. Though, I wonder about the difference between a Netflix algorithm making a recommendation and a human doing the same. When a Tesla car looks, is it doing the same thing a human would do when they look? More importantly, what are the consequences of conflating algorithm activity with human activity?
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December 20, 2020 introduction
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In the short film Perfectly Natural, we see a young couple, their new baby, and a simulated reality where the baby interacts with her artificially programmed parents. Over the course of this film’s fourteen minutes, we see a familiar thread of theoretical interactions between humans and their artificially intelligent counterparts. First, there is an apparent excitement from experiencing something new and fantastic, then a series of routine correspondence, and finally a hint of mortal obsoletion. Now, if we replace the human parents in this film with humans in the real world, and the simulated reality with colloquial “artificial intelligence”, these three interactions are not a far cry from what we have observed since the idea of AI was born. That is, the human creates some thing new and fantastic, exploits the utility of said thing via regular correspondence (or use), and is potentially overtaken by the same. What does this say about our place in the evolution of “thinking machines,” and what are some ethical concerns therein?
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