21st
Except for that joke at the bottom regarding our god-like cephalopods, the rest of today’s stuff all relates to something that is beginning to coalesce for me: a connection between the creation of an AI intelligence and the collapse of capitalism. The way that the western capitalist system is collapsing suggests patterns to me that indicate that a true AI can never come into being. Or perhaps it is the arguments used against the eventual emergence of an AI that are illuminating for me a part of what went wrong in our society.
AI, as it is currently being sought by most people, is a creation of humanity, a techne. So is the economy. Both are based on a system or rules and explanations. By relying solely on programming laws to create increasingly complex behavior, AI programmers are interpreting intelligent life as consisting solely of programmed rules.
But I think that the closest we will ever reach to a true artificial intelligence will only be a kind of poetic computing. We can raise programming to such a high level of artistic expression that it takes on the semblance of life, but actual life and intelligence is more than this.
In the collapse of the economy (and the possible collapse of western society as a whole), we see where relying on more and more complex rules gets us. The life force motivating the system (that is, the people) are being crushed by an overwhelming complexity and misuse of the rules (that is, the bureaucracy).
Does anyone expect more intelligent behavior to emerge from a more complicated bureaucracy? I doubt it.
So why do we do we expect it from computer code? Probably because computers don’t make mistakes while humanity does. But I think that our ability to make mistakes is exactly what makes humanity a better vehicle for intelligent consciousness than AI will ever be.
We can act on less than perfect code. We can perceive the infinite in a feedback loop without having to get stuck by stepping into it. Perfect code would eventually exhaust it’s options. Only by including an ability to make mistakes, which then collapse the system and require a rewriting of the code, can life progress infinitely. See the Nassim Nicholas Taleb video below. We can allow for what we don’t know. We have the potential to embody emptiness, to leave a space in our “programs” for the unknown to enter.
In my opinion, (and granted, I’m no programmer) nothing created by man, no program or techne, no matter how complex, can ever embody emptiness like humanity can. It is that which makes life worth living, and we’ve been doing a shitty job of it lately.
