A while back I explained why I was very skeptical of “Crypto” hype on a Marxist basis. [1] I want to try something similar against &#

Dialectics and “Artificial Intelligence”

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2023-03-26 13:30:04

A while back I explained why I was very skeptical of “Crypto” hype on a Marxist basis. [1] I want to try something similar against “Artificial Intelligence” hype.

Of course, we ought to begin by making clear what we mean by “intelligence.” It’s a controversial subject, and definitions abound: Advocates of I.Q. tests argue that intelligence basically boils down to pattern recognition and endeavor to represent it with one single score; advocates of “Multiple Intelligence” theories speak more qualitatively, observing for example that people who are good at puzzles are often very bad at noticing subtleties in communication or managing relationships. In my experience I’d say that the second camp aligns better with how I prefer to use the word, but there is something to be said for “fast thinking,” and so maybe the first camp still has something to contribute to our overall understanding. At any rate, I define the concept as follows:

What is “cognitive pressure”? We’re organisms capable of observation and reflection. We’re always absorbing information through our senses, but at the same time we are comparing whatever inputs we receive to our expectations. Recently, for example, many people reported that one side-effect of COVID-19 was that their sense of taste went awry, so that a sip of milk tasted like gasoline. This is obviously disturbing. Another example: if our eyes see a flat horizon, but the liquid in our ears says otherwise, we experience vertigo. It could generally be said that it’s good that whenever we take in an observation that jars with our expectations we feel stress. It’s a good survival skill. “Cognitive” simply refers to the fact that this pressure is in our minds, rather than in our muscles or in our bones.

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