danbroussard

How connected is the experience of blogging in cyberspace to shouting words in your head toward a void of infinite psychic landscape? I started this blog as a sort of public palette for personal brainstorms. The more I learn about the practices of spiders, bots and corporate scraping the less inclined I am to post anything of any perceptible value. The fear of the loss of my perceived intellectual property should give way to the inner open source collectivist in me who knows that I truly own nothing but my own conscious perspective and let my memes go bouncing off into Indra's echo chamber. If any of my ideas are to affect change in the world they should not be built on so quickly a cascading foundation as the quest for currency, property, or the fleeting vanities of this existence. What is the human?

From Antigone by Sophocles

Wonders are many, and none is more dreadful than man. [335] This power spans the sea, even when it surges white before the gales of the south-wind, and makes a path under swells that threaten to engulf him. Earth, too, the eldest of the gods, the immortal, the unwearied, he wears away to his own ends, turning the soil with the offspring of horses as the plows weave to and fro year after year The light-hearted tribe of birds and the clans of wild beasts and the sea-brood of the deep he snares in the meshes of his twisted nets, and he leads them captive, very-skilled man. He masters by his arts the beast who dwells in the wilds and roams the hills. He tames the shaggy-maned horse, putting the yoke upon its neck, and tames the tireless mountain bull. Speech and thought fast as the wind and the moods that give order to a city he has taught himself, and how to flee the arrows of the inhospitable frost under clear skies and the arrows of the storming rain. He has resource for everything. Lacking resource in nothing he strides towards what must come. From Death alone he shall procure no escape, but from baffling diseases he has devised flights.[365] Possessing resourceful skill, a subtlety beyond expectation he moves now to evil, now to good.

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An excerpt from the Wired:Geekipedia

Artificial vision gets sharper all the time. Artificial walking has made great robot strides. But artificial intelligence is brain-dead. Why? Because while researchers have built awesome technology, they've failed to grapple with philosophy.

Early computer scientists like Alan Turing and John von Neumann attempted to spin logic circuitry into thinking machines. So they designed their creations to excel at tasks they thought embodied the heights of human intellect: calculating sums, analyzing geometry, and playing chess. In 1958, a computer beat a human chess player — albeit an inexperienced one — for the first time. Buoyed by this success, researchers embarked on a long attempt to invent a machine that could (a) talk just like Turing, (b) walk around in a robot body looking at stuff, picking it up, and using it neatly, (c) read newspapers and maybe correct the editors, and (d) program its own successors.

The notion of intelligent machines inspired a blizzard of books and movies, but practical returns were meager. Over the years, computers failed one commonsense task after another: manipulating unfamiliar objects, understanding natural language, distinguishing a dog from a cat. Despite steady advances in hardware, no machine could think as far as to laugh at a pratfall or make a bad pun.

In pursuing human-style intelligence, the geeks blundered into the deepest, densest, darkest thickets of metaphysics: consciousness, cognition, perception, self-awareness, and how "we" manage to "know" what we know. It turns out that activities like playing chess — things that require sorting and searching — are relatively easy to program, whereas tasks that require some understanding of the world at large, like doing the laundry, are unbearably complex. The metaphysical issues around AI are at a standstill, mainly because metaphysics is old and canny and doesn't move forward in the linear manner of technology. Researchers, their grand illusions and ambitions dashed, fell into a long "AI winter" of shrunken budgets and general indifference.

Nowadays, Google "knows" pretty much anything you ask it. But its insanely fast and powerful work is modestly described as data-mining, not thinking. That vast, globe-spanning, superpowerful, ultrawealthy Web spider has yet to awaken and declare, "I am Google."

But if it starts writing philosophy, all bets are off.