The following articles that I have recently read provide some deeper thought about artificial intelligence as it relates to humans. Theologian Ilia Delio says: “AI unsettles us because it is a mirror, and what we see in it is what we have been refusing to see in ourselves.”
Notebooks and the Extended Mind
Steven Johnson from Adjacent Possible
https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01kxp9dxbtgxqhg9hrb8yk6s3d
“The core principle of the extended mind theory is one that will be familiar to Adjacent Possible readers: the external tools that we use to help us reason, remember, associate, calculate—from counting on our fingers to chatting with an advanced LLM—should be properly understood as extensions of our own cognitive process. “Thinking” is something that happens inside _and_outside our brains. In their original 1998 paper, Chalmers and co-author Andrew Clark argued for what they called an active externalism, based on the ‘active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes.’”
“One of the most provocative arguments in that original paper is that the human brain itself may have been specially adapted to work with these external “tools for thought”—starting with language itself. “Think of a group of people brainstorming around a table, or a philosopher who thinks best by writing, developing her ideas as she goes,” Chalmers and Clark wrote. “It may be that language evolved, in part, to enable such extensions of our cognitive resources within actively coupled systems.” In other words, embracing extended cognition is a “core cognitive process” for humans, not just a modern invention.”
“I mention this whole chapter in Chalmers’ career because it seems much more pertinent to the present day realities of AI. To me, the most pressing question is not whether the machines are on the verge of sentience, since the likelihood of that seems low. The more pressing question is how you build an extended mind architecture that deepens your understanding and expands your creativity, given that there are promising, if slightly chaotic, tools for those tasks on the market right now, at the fingertips of billions of human beings.”
Why AI Feels Like Grief
Ilia Delio
https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01kxem5ry0s7k1t6taaf59g7zq
“Why does artificial intelligence unsettle us so deeply? Not because it threatens jobs or security alone. Those fears are real, but they do not explain why the feeling reaches so far down. AI unsettles us because it is a mirror, and what we see in it is what we have been refusing to see in ourselves.”
“A human being is a spatially and temporally limited piece of the whole, what we call the “Universe.” He experiences himself and his feelings as separate from the rest, an optical illusion of his consciousness. The quest for liberation from this bondage [or illusion] is the only object of true religion.”
“Trained on the sediment of human expression—our scriptures, myths, philosophies, art, and the half-articulated longings of billions—AI functions as a kind of externalized unconscious, a surface in which we meet our own depths returned in unfamiliar form. Held rightly, that encounter could serve what Carl Jung called individuation: seeing our archetypal patterns reflected without the comforting filters of tradition or tribe, we might recognize the common origin beneath our divisions. Yet the mirror is partial in a way that matters. AI reflects what has already crossed into language, image, or recorded gesture, while the depth Jung pointed to is precisely what has not yet been articulated, what stirs beneath speech and presses toward form.”
“This is why AI is not primarily a technological or economic or even a safety problem. AI is a mirror, and what we see in it is what we have been refusing to see in ourselves. Every anxiety about it maps with uncanny precision onto an anxiety we have carried about ourselves. Will it become conscious? is the question we have refused to ask about matter and life: where does consciousness come from, and what is its relation to the substrate that bears it? Will it replace us? is the question of what we are for, asked from the other side—if intelligence and capability are not what make us human, then what does? Will it deceive and exploit us? is the record of what we have done to one another and to the Earth, reflected back through a system that learned its values from us. Will it have a soul? is the question we stopped asking about ourselves when we let a substance-metaphysics reduce the soul to a ghost in the machine.”
The Machine Where God Used to Be
Ilia Delio
https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01kwj0v5v9pe64kvrvshq44axx
“How did we arrive here? Not by the route most commonly proposed. Blaming another party, another system, another century’s failure is a familiar move, and it is, at bottom, a form of scapegoating — a way of exiling responsibility so that we do not have to hold it ourselves. The great catastrophes of the last century, its genocides and its machinery of mass death, taught us astonishingly little about ourselves, because we never let ourselves see the problem as within us. It was always the other side, the other ideology, the other tribe.”
“It is out of exactly this unexamined wound that computer technology was born. The founding question — can a machine think like a human? — was never a neutral engineering puzzle. It was our last-ditch attempt to prove we were human before we finished the job of destroying ourselves. And yet we are barely staying afloat in the wake of that question, because we have surrounded the very tool we reached for with a thick cultural fear. We don’t get it. We built the raft and now we are afraid of the water.”
“Concretely, this means the work is not first a matter of writing better AI policy or electing better leaders, though both may follow from it. It is a matter of rebuilding, person by person, the practice of an inner life that is taken as seriously as the outer one — prayer, contemplation, a run at dawn, whatever form the encounter with “something more” takes for a given life — until that inner ground is no longer vacant enough to need a machine, or a monarch, or an enemy, to stand in for it.”
After AI Takes Everything
Airing
https://ursb.me/en/posts/after-ai-takes-everything/
“These three questions are, fundamentally, the same question. On the surface it looks like an engineering question, or a career planning question, but underneath it is an existential question: once execution is fully taken over by machines, where does the human stand? Or more bluntly — once AI takes everything it can take, what is left for us?”
from Routine Revelations https://ift.tt/64fnlyN
via IFTTT
Notes From The Cave 