On AI Aliens

“Humans and computers belong to separate and incommensurable realms... For Weizenbaum, we cannot humanise AI because AI is irreducibly non-human. What you can do, however, is not make computers do (or mean) too much. We should never ‘substitute a computer system for a human function that involves interpersonal respect, understanding and love,’ he wrote in Computer Power and Human Reason. Living well with computers would mean putting them in their proper place: as aides to calculation, never judgment. Weizenbaum never ruled out the possibility that intelligence could someday develop in a computer. But if it did, he told the writer Daniel Crevier in 1991, it would ‘be at least as different as the intelligence of a dolphin is to that of a human being.’ There is a possible future hiding here that is neither an echo chamber filled with racist parrots nor the Hollywood dystopia of Skynet. It is a future in which we form a relationship with AI as we would with another species: awkwardly, across great distances, but with the potential for some rewarding moments. Dolphins would make bad judges and terrible shrinks. But they might make for interesting friends.”

Ben Tarnoff, “A Certain Danger Lurks There”: How the Inventor of the First Chatbot Turned against AI.” - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/25/joseph-weizenbaum-inventor-eliza-chatbot-turned-against-artificial-intelligence-ai.

On Writing for Perplexity

“In the current/future of AI writing, how do we avoid producing stochastic students or becoming language models ourselves? Bender and her coauthors argue for more critical engagement with language models and implicitly offer us paths forward. They note that language models work statistically, predicting next words without reference to meaning. Drawing on the fact that writing from language models tends to be predictable, AI writing detectors use perplexity to discriminate between AI and human writing. But a student, if we’re not careful, can also predict words without reference to meaning. If a student is taught and rewarded for commonplaces and stock genres, they will reproduce their training data: the boring commonplaces no teacher relishes reading and no writer learns from reproducing. Instead, we should teach and write for perplexity — not so much to avoid plagiarism detectors but to avoid the commonplaces that block critical thinking. We should all write for critical inquiry.”

Annett Vee, “Against Output,” In the Moment - https://critinq.wordpress.com/2023/06/28/against-output/. She is referring to Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major and Schmitchell’s recent paper “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?”

On Neural Correlates of Consciousness

“Two friends — David Chalmers, a philosopher, and Christof Koch, a neuroscientist — took the stage to recall an old bet. In June 1998, they had gone to a conference in Bremen, Germany, and ended up talking late one night at a local bar about the nature of consciousness. For years, Dr. Koch had collaborated with Francis Crick, a biologist who shared a Nobel Prize for uncovering the structure of DNA, on a quest for what they called the ‘neural correlate of consciousness.’ They believed that every conscious experience we have — gazing at a painting, for example — is associated with the activity of certain neurons essential for the awareness that comes with it. Dr. Chalmers liked the concept, but he was skeptical that they could find such a neural marker any time soon. Scientists still had too much to learn about consciousness and the brain, he figured, before they could have a reasonable hope of finding it... But the 25-year bet, at least, has been resolved: No one has found a clear neural correlate of consciousness. Dr. Koch ended the evening by carrying to the stage a wooden box full of wine. He pulled out a 1978 bottle of Madeira and gave it to Dr. Chalmers.”

Carl Zimmer, “2 Leading Theories of Consciousness Square Off” - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/science/consciousness-theories.html.

On Extending Collective Intelligence

“Extending the collective intelligence of others was a practical solution, not an idealistic one. Atherton’s group observed that, because the new computer terminal locations at Syracuse were ‘remote from a reference librarian or any other human specialists in the user’s interest area’, they would need an additional source of help, which could be found in ‘the human intelligence of all other users of the system’... Atherton’s group saw that we would lose expert intermediaries; they designed for this cost. In 2022 and 2023, as the first generative AI search engines, including academic search engines such as Elicit and Consensus, were introduced to a wide set of users to both great excitement and scepticism, it is similarly useful to analyse what will be lost when researchers come to rely on these tools.”

Monica Westin, “Ingenious Librarians,” https://aeon.co/essays/the-1970s-librarians-who-revolutionised-the-challenge-of-search. Extended mind theory has much to say about the theoretical modeling of our reliance upon others in search technologies.

On the Unwritten World

“The comparison between the world and a book has had a long history starting in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. What language is the book of the world written in? According to Galileo, it’s the language of mathematics and geometry, a language of absolute exactitude. Can we read the world of today in this way? Maybe, if we’re talking about the extremely distant: galaxies, quasars, supernovas. But as for our daily world, it seems to us written, rather, as in a mosaic of languages, like a wall covered with graffiti, writings traced one on top of the other, a palimpsest whose parchment has been scratched and rewritten many times, a collage by Schwitters, a layering of alphabets, of diverse citations, of slang terms, of flickering characters like those which appear on a computer screen... In a certain sense, I believe that we always write about something we don’t know: we write to make it possible for the unwritten world to express itself through us. At the moment my attention shifts from the regular order of the written lines and follows the mobile complexity that no sentence can contain or use up, I feel close to understanding that from the other side of the words, from the silent side, something is trying to emerge, to signify through language, like tapping on a prison wall. ”

Italo Calvino, “The Written World and the Unwritten World,” - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/01/05/the-written-world-and-the-unwritten-world/. An interesting comment from a lecture Calvino gave in 1983. It evinces a kind of mysticism about the unwritten world. One wonders what Calvino might have made of the more recent biodeconstruction of Francesco Vitale. As Calvino noted in this same lecture, “I started from the irreconcilable difference between the written world and the unwritten world; if their two languages merge, my argument crumbles.”

On Bruegel's Multiplicity

“Antwerp was now the most cosmopolitan city in Europe. This plunge into the overwhelming world of sophisticated reality had a profound psychological effect on the young Bruegel. Moored up along the quayside he would have seen lateen-sail barques from Portugal, three-masters which had voyaged from ports as far afield as Zanzibar and Stavanger, their cargoes loaded onto barges from Delft or Mosel, barrels being rolled across the cobbles by sailors in ragged and exotic garb, marking them out as Finnish, Scottish, or Moorish. Lined up for sale would have been opened crates of currants from Cyprus, tulip bulbs from Constantinople, reeking salted hides from the eastern Baltic, barrels of sweet wine from Sicily... Yet all this went deeper than mere impressions and appearances. How could he absorb and express the sheer variety of teeming life he found milling around him amongst the vast cobbled space of the Grote Markt, overlooked by windowed cliffs of many-storied houses, with the great unfinished Gothic tower of the Cathedral of Our Lady reaching into the sky above the rooftops? How could he render such scenes without being overwhelmed by the sheer teeming multiplicity and variety of it all?”

Paul Strathern, “The Sheer Teeming Multiplicity and Variety of It All: The Life and Work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder,” https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/sheer-teeming-multiplicity-and-variety-it-all. Bruegel’s 1563 The Tower of Babel would be part of his answer.

The Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563. Kunsthistorisches Museum.

On Digital Provenance

“Today, most people take it for granted that the Web, and indeed the Internet it is built on, is, by its nature, anti-contextual and devoid of provenance. We assume that decontextualization is intrinsic to the very idea of a digital network. That was never so, however; the initial proposals for digital-network architecture, put forward by the monumental scientist Vannevar Bush in 1945 and the computer scientist Ted Nelson in 1960, preserved provenance. Now A.I. is revealing the true costs of ignoring this approach. Without provenance, we have no way of controlling our A.I.s, or of making them economically fair. And this risks pushing our society to the brink.”

Jaron Lanier, “There Is No A.I.” - https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/there-is-no-ai. As Lanier notes, if A.I. had inbuilt provenance then it could more easily achieve the “foundation agreement” amongst his tech colleagues “that deepfakes—false but real-seeming images, videos, and so on—should be labelled as such by the programs that create them. Communications coming from artificial people, and automated interactions that are designed to manipulate the thinking or actions of a human being, should be labelled as well. We also agree that these labels should come with actions that can be taken. People should be able to understand what they’re seeing, and should have reasonable choices in return.”

On Narrow AI

“And when we say narrow AI, the AI that’s optimizing, that’s really all it is. It is a machine. It is a tool. Even if it is driving us around in an autonomous vehicle, it is not intelligently thinking, and it is not at all able to reason with common sense. Even artificial intelligence is somewhat of a misnomer. When we think of intelligence, there are many types of things that aggregate to cause us to think someone is intelligent. If someone does only one thing extremely well, do we call that personal intelligent? If they can’t explain why they did what they did, other than knowing the most probable stock to buy today is this stock, or that we should not loan this person money because the default likelihood is 23 percent. Is that really intelligent? I don’t think so.”

Kai-Fu Lee, “We Are Here to Create,” https://www.edge.org/conversation/kai_fu_lee-we-are-here-to-create. Interesting conversation with a pioneer of artificial technology from March 26 2018. An engineer with a deep understanding of how AI works, Lee highlights the narrowness of AI and its key differences from human cognition, thinking and consciousness. His conclusion is also worth noting: “I don’t have the solutions, but if we want to come back to the question of why we exist, we at this point can say we certainly don’t exist to do routine work. We perhaps exist to create. We perhaps exist to love. And if we want to create, let’s create new types of jobs that people can be employed in. Let’s create new ways in which countries can work together. If we think we exist to love, let’s first think how we can love the people who will be disadvantaged.”

On Daily Rituals

“Daily Rituals is one of those books where you wish you had the idea. He looks at thinkers, artists, writers, philosophers, scientists and asks how they work... Of course, everybody’s different and there is lots of variety, but after a while, you do discern certain patterns. There are outliers, but the majority of these people work between three to five hours a day. And they have built into their days times where they are doing something that’s nothing to do with their work. That might be having lunches with their friends, it might be going for long walks. That makes perfect sense to me. If you’re going to do anything that involves your mind and thinking well, there’s only a limited amount of space you can give to that. In order to think well, you need to then make sure the times when you’re not doing it are giving you the opportunity to let things stew, to work away in your unconscious, in the background of your mind, or give you the rest and relaxation so when you come back, you’re rejuvenated.”

Julien Baggini, “Five Books on How to Think,” - https://fivebooks.com/best-books/how-to-think-julian-baggini/.

On Comparing Religious Ideas

“However, religious ideas are not self-contained. Christian ideas were strongly influenced by ancient Greek thought; Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism have interacted continually throughout history; and Indian religions have been influenced by many philosophical perspectives, which have themselves interacted in various ways. Religious ideas are in continual interaction, and continually changing, even, ironically, when they sometimes claim to be changeless. Changes of language and of interpretation become evident to any alert historian of ideas, so that even to understand one tradition fully requires a knowledge of the social and cultural influences which forced new problems and new solutions on that tradition.”

Keith Ward, “On ‘Comparative Theology,’” - https://philosophyofreligion.org/?p=525740. This is an excerpt from an interesting blog on the future of philosophy of religion, which just posted a series on comparative work. I’ve cited Ward’s approach in the past as part of the outline of a model for comparative political theology in deliberative democratic societies. It recognizes that religious ideas often interact in ways that require great comparative care and sometimes result in irresolvable differences. As Eric Steinhart on this same website also argues, “comparison reveals difference rather than unity.” Also worth noting in this context is Timothy Knapper’s post on the Global Critical Philosophy of Religion project, which now hosts a unit in the American Academy of Religion annual conference program. I’d just add that my own approach locates the comparative task in the deliberative democratic context of building up citizen capacities to encounter differences and respond to religious strife. I’m writing a textbook this year on Understanding Religion through the Eyes of Others (Routledge, 2024) that develops this approach to studying diverse religious thinkers with these comparative concerns in view.