Svesne mašine, veštačka inteligencija, Kurcvajl, Serl, Drajfus...

Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2029 scientists will have created conscious computers. Rubbish

Spoiler:

Kurzweil projects that between now and 2050 medical advances will allow people to radically extend their lifespans while preserving and even improving quality of life as they age. The aging process could at first be slowed, then halted, and then reversed as newer and better medical technologies became available.

http://dictionnaire.sensagent.leparisien.fr/Raymond_Kurzweil/en-en/

The world is Organized by embodied beings like us to be coped with by beings like us. The computer would be totally lost in our world. It would have to have in it a model of the world and a model of the body, which AI researchers have tried, but it's certainly hopeless. Without that, the world is just utterly un-graspable by computers.

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people5/Dreyfus/dreyfus-con6.html
 
The truth is that human intelligence can never be replaced with machine intelligence simply because we are not ourselves thinking machines. Each of us has, and uses every day, a power of intuitive intelligence that enables us to understand, to speak, and to cope skillfully with our everyday environment.

https://tinyurl.com/jywjy87

'Could a machine think?' My own view is that only a machine could think, and indeed only very special kinds of machines, namely brains and machines that had the same causal powers as brains. And that is the main reason strong AI has had little to tell us about thinking, since it has nothing to tell us about machines. By its own definition, it is about programs, and programs are not machines. Whatever else intentionality is, it is a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation, photosynthesis, or any other biological phenomena. No one would suppose that we could produce milk and sugar by running a computer simulation of the formal sequences in lactation and photosynthesis, but where the mind is concerned many people are willing to believe in such a miracle because of a deep and abiding dualism: the mind they suppose is a matter of formal processes and is independent of quite specific material causes in the way that milk and sugar are not.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/div-classtitlethe-milk-of-human-intentionalitydiv/5F6F054DCB3738ACDB5DB8611FAFD243

If men create intelligent machines, or fantasize about them, it is either because they secretly despair of their own intelligence or because they are in danger of succumbing to the weight of a monstrous and useless intelligence which they seek to exorcize by transferring it to machines, where they can play with it and make fun of it. By entrusting this burdensome intelligence to machines we are released from any responsibility to knowledge, much as entrusting power to politicians allows us to disdain any aspiration of our own to power.
   If men dream of machines that are unique, that are endowed with genius, it is because they despair of their own uniqueness, or because they prefer to do without it -- to enjoy it by proxy, so to speak, thanks to machines. What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself.
   It is not for nothing that they are described as "virtual", for they put thought on hold indefinitely, tying its emergence to the achievement of a complete knowledge. The act of thinking itself is thus put off for ever. Indeed, the question of thought can no more be raised than the question of the freedom of future generations, who will pass through life as we travel through the air, strapped into their seats. These Men of Artificial Intelligence will traverse their own mental space bound hand and foot to their computers. Immobile in front of his computer, Virtual Man makes love via the screen and gives lessons by means of the teleconference. He is a physical -- and no doubt also a mental -- cripple. That is the price he pays for being operational. Just as eyeglasses and contact lenses will arguably one day evolve into implanted prostheses for a species that has lost its sight, it is similarly to be feared that artificial intelligence and the hardware that supports it will become a mental prosthesis for a species without the capacity for thought.
 
Artificial intelligence is devoid of intelligence because it is devoid of artifice. True artifice is the artifice of the body in the throes of passion, the artifice of the sign in seduction, the artifice of ambivalence in gesture, the artifice of ellipsis in language, the artifice of the mask before the face, the artifice of the pithy remark that completely alters meaning. So-called intelligent machines deploy artifice only in the feeblest sense of the word, breaking linguistic, sexual or cognitive acts down into their simplest elements and digitizing them so that they can be resynthesized according to models. They can generate all the possibilities of a program or of a potential object. But artifice is in no way concerned with what generates, merely with what alters, reality. Artifice is the power of illusion. These machines have the artlessness of pure calculation, and the games they offer are based solely on commutations and combinations. In this sense they may be said to be virtuous, as well as virtual: they can never succumb to their own object; they are immune even to the seduction of their own knowledge. Their virtue resides in their transparency, their functionality, their absence of passion and artifice. Artificial Intelligence is a celibate machine.
   What must always distinguish the way humans function from the way machines function, even the most intelligent of machines, is the intoxication, the sheer pleasure, that humans get from functioning. The invention of a machine that can feel pleasure is something -- happily -- that is still beyond human capacity. All kinds of spare parts are available to humans to help them achieve gratification, but none has yet been devised that could take pleasure in their stead. There are prostheses that can work better than humans, "think" or move around better than humans (or in place of humans), but there is no such thing, from the point of view of technology or in terms of the media, as a replacement for human pleasure, or for the pleasure of being human. For that to exist, machines would have to have an idea of man, have to be able to invent man -- but inasmuch as man has already invented them, it is too late for that. That is why man can always be more than he is, whereas machines can never be more than they are. Even the most intelligent among machines are just what they are -- except, perhaps, when accidents or failures occur, events which might conceivably be attributed to some obscure desire on the part of the machine. Nor do machines manifest that ironical surplus or excess functioning which contributes the pleasure, or suffering, thanks to which human beings transcend their determinations -- and thus come closer to their raison d'être. Alas for the machine, it can never transcend its own operation -- which, perhaps, explains the profound melancholy of the computer. All machines are celibate.
   (All the same, the recent epidemic of computer viruses does embody a striking anomaly: it is almost as though machines were able to obtain a sly pleasure by producing perverse effects. This is an ironic and fascinating turn of events. Could it be that artificial intelligence, by manifesting this viral pathology, is engaging in self-parody -- and thus acceding to some sort of genuine intelligence?)
 
The celibacy of the machine entails the celibacy of Telecomputer Man. Thanks to his computer or word processor, Telecomputer Man offers himself the spectacle of his own brain, his own intelligence, at work. Similarly, through his chat line or his Minitel, he can offer himself the spectacle of his own phantasies, of a strictly virtual pleasure. He exorcizes both intelligence and pleasure at the interface with the machine. The Other, the interlocutor, is never really involved: the screen works much like a mirror, for the screen itself as locus of the interface is the prime concern. An interactive screen transforms the process of relating into a process of commutation between One and the Same. The secret of the interface is that the Other here is virtually the Same: otherness is surreptitiously conjured away by the machine. The most probable scenario of communication here is that Minitel users gravitate from the screen to telephone conversations, thence to face-to-face meetings, and... then what? Well, it's "let's phone each other", and, finally, back to the Minitel -- which is, after all, more erotic because it is at once both esoteric and transparent. This is communication in its purest form, for there is no intimacy here except with the screen, and with an electronic text that is no more than a design filigreed onto life. A new Plato's retreat whence to observe shadow-forms of bodily pleasure filing past. Why speak to one another, when it is so simple to communicate?
 
We lived once in a world where the realm of the imaginary was governed by the mirror, by dividing one into two, by theatre, by otherness and alienation. Today that realm is the realm of the screen, of interfaces and duplication, of contiguity and networks. All our machines are screens, and the interactivity of humans has been replaced by the interactivity of screens. Nothing inscribed on these screens is ever intended to be deciphered in any depth: rather, it is supposed to be explored instantaneously, in an abreaction immediate to meaning, a short-circuiting of the poles of representation.
 
Reading a screenful of information is quite a different thing from looking. It is a digital form of exploration in which the eye moves along an endless broken line. The relationship to the interlocutor in communication, like the relationship to knowledge in data-handling, is similar: tactile and exploratory. A computer-generated voice, even a voice over the telephone, is a tactile voice, neutral and functional. It is no longer in fact exactly a voice, any more than looking at a screen is exactly looking. The whole paradigm of the sensory has changed. The tactility here is not the organic sense of touch: it implies merely an epidermal contiguity of eye and image, the collapse of the aesthetic distance involved in looking. We draw ever closer to the surface of the screen; our gaze is, as it were, strewn across the image. We no longer have the spectator's distance from the stage -- all theatrical conventions are gone. That we fall so easily into the screen's coma of the imagination is due to the fact that the screen presents a perpetual void that we are invited to fill. Proxemics of images: promiscuity of images: tactile pornography of images. Yet the image is always light years away. It is invariably a tele-image -- an image located at a very special kind of distance which can only be described as unbridgeable by the body. The body can cross the distance that separates it from language, from the stage, or from the mirror -- this is what keeps it human and allows it to partake in exchange. But the screen is merely virtual -- and hence unbridgeable. This is why it partakes only of that abstract -- definitively abstract -- form known as communication.
 
Within the space of communication, words, gestures, looks are in a continual state of contiguity, yet they never touch. The fact is that distance and proximity here are simply not relationships obtaining between the body and its surroundings. The screen of our images, the interactive screen, the telecomputing screen, are at once too close and too far away: too close to be true (to have the dramatic intensity of a stage) -- and too far away to be false (to embody the collusive distance of artifice). They thus create a dimension that is no longer quite human, an excentric dimension corresponding to the depolarization of space and the indistinctness of bodily forms of expression.
   There is no better model of the way in which the computer screen and the mental screen of our own brain are interwoven than Moebius's topology, with its peculiar contiguity of near and far, inside and outside, object and subject within the same spiral. It is in accordance with this same model that information and communication are constantly turning round upon themselves in an incestuous circumvolution, a superficial conflation of subject and object, within and without, question and answer, event and image, and so on. The form is inevitably that of a twisted ring reminiscent of the mathematical symbol for infinity.
   The same may be said of our relationship with our "virtual" machines. Telecomputer Man is assigned to an apparatus, just as the apparatus is assigned to him, by virtue of an involution of each into the other, a refraction of each by the other. The machine does what the human wants it to do, but by the same token the human puts into execution only what the machine has been programmed to do. The operator is working with virtuality: only apparently is the aim to obtain information or to communicate; the real purpose is to explore all the possibilities of a program, rather as a gambler seeks to exhaust the permutations in a game of chance. Consider the way the camera is used now. Its possibilities are no longer those of a subject who "reflects" the world according to his personal vision; rather, they are the possibilities of the lens, as exploited by the object. The camera is thus a machine that vitiates all will, erases all intentionality and leaves nothing but the pure reflex needed to take pictures. Looking itself disappears without trace, replaced by a lens now in collusion with the object -- and hence with an inversion of vision. The magic lies precisely in the subject's retroversion to a camera obscura -- the reduction of his vision to the impersonal vision of a mechanical device. In a mirror, it is the subject who gives free rein to the realm of the imaginary. In the camera lens, and on-screen in general, it is the object, potentially, that unburdens itself -- to the benefit of all media and telecommunications techniques.
   This is why images of anything are now a possibility. This is why everything is translatable into computer terms, commutable into digital form, just as each individual is commutable into his own particular genetic code. (The whole object, in fact, is to exhaust all the virtualities of such analogues of the genetic code: this is one of artificial intelligence's most fundamental aspects.) What this means on a more concrete level is that there is no longer any such thing as an act or an event which is not refracted into a technical image or onto a screen, any such thing as an action which does not in some sense want to be photographed, filmed or tape-recorded, does not desire to be stored in memory so as to become reproducible for all eternity. No such thing as an action which does not aspire to self-transcendence into a virtual eternity -- not, now, the durable eternity that follows death, but rather the ephemeral eternity of ever-ramifying artificial memory.
   The compulsion of the virtual is the compulsion to exist in potentia on all screens, to be embedded in all programs, and it acquires a magical force: the Siren call of the black box.
 
Where is the freedom in all this? Nowhere! There is no choice here, no final decision. All decisions concerning networks, screens, information or communication are serial in character, partial, fragmentary, fractal. A mere succession of partial decisions, a microscopic series of partial sequences and objectives, constitute as much the photographer's way of proceeding as that of Telecomputer Man in general, or even that called for by our own most trivial television viewing. All such behaviour is structured in quantum fashion, composed of haphazard sequences of discrete decisions. The fascination derives from the pull of the black box, the appeal of an uncertainty which puts paid to our freedom.
 
Am I a man or a machine? This anthropological question no longer has an answer. We are thus in some sense witness to the end of anthropology, now being conjured away by the most recent machines and technologies. The uncertainty here is born of the perfecting of machine networks, just as sexual uncertainty (Am I a man or a woman? What has the difference between the sexes become?) is born of increasingly sophisticated manipulation of the unconscious and of the body, and just as science's uncertainty about the status of its object is born of the sophistication of analysis in the microsciences.
   Am I a man or a machine? There is no ambiguity in the traditional relationship between man and machine: the worker is always, in a way, a stranger to the machine he operates, and alienated by it. But at least he retains the precious status of alienated man. The new technologies, with their new machines, new images and interactive screens, do not alienate me. Rather, they form an integrated circuit with me. Video screens, televisions, computers and Minitels resemble nothing so much as contact lenses in that they are so many transparent prostheses, integrated into the body to the point of being almost part of its genetic make-up: they are like pacemakers -- or like Philip K. Dick's "papula", a tiny implant, grafted onto the body at birth as a "free gift", which serves the organism as an alarm signal. All our relationships with networks and screens, whether willed or not, are of this order. Their structure is one of subordination, not of alienation -- the structure of the integrated circuit. Man or machine? Impossible to tell.
   Surely the extraordinary success of artificial intelligence is attributable to the fact that it frees us from real intelligence, that by hypertrophying thought as an operational process it frees us from thought's ambiguity and from the insoluble puzzle of its relationship to the world. Surely the success of all these technologies is a result of the way in which they make it impossible even to raise the timeless question of liberty. What a relief! Thanks to the machinery of the virtual, all your problems are over! You are no longer either subject or object, no longer either free or alienated -- and no longer either one or the other: you are the same, and enraptured by the commutations of that sameness. We have left the hell of other people for the ecstasy of the same, the purgatory of otherness for the artificial paradises of identity. Some might call this an even worse servitude, but Telecomputer Man, having no will of his own, knows nothing of serfdom. Alienation of man by man is a thing of the past: now man is plunged into homeostasis by machines.

The argument and thought-experiment now generally known as the Chinese Room Argument was first published in a paper in 1980 by American philosopher John Searle (1932- ). It has become one of the best-known arguments in recent philosophy. Searle imagines himself alone in a room following a computer program for responding to Chinese characters slipped under the door. Searle understands nothing of Chinese, and yet, by following the program for manipulating symbols and numerals just as a computer does, he produces appropriate strings of Chinese characters that fool those outside into thinking there is a Chinese speaker in the room. The narrow conclusion of the argument is that programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand language but does not produce real understanding. Hence the “Turing Test” is inadequate. Searle argues that the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics. The broader conclusion of the argument is that the theory that human minds are computer-like computational or information processing systems is refuted. Instead minds must result from biological processes; computers can at best simulate these biological processes. Thus the argument has large implications for semantics, philosophy of language and mind, theories of consciousness, computer science and cognitive science generally. As a result, there have been many critical replies to the argument.

It's mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output."

Musk explained what he meant by saying that computers can communicate at "a trillion bits per second", while humans, whose main communication method is typing with their fingers via a mobile device, can do about 10 bits per second.

In an age when AI threatens to become widespread, humans would be useless, so there's a need to merge with machines, according to Musk.

"Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem," Musk explained.

The technologists proposal would see a new layer of a brain able to access information quickly and tap into artificial intelligence. It's not the first time Musk has spoken about the need for humans to evolve, but it's a constant theme of his talks on how society can deal with the disruptive threat of AI.

Počnimo s razmatranjem najjednostavnijih i najočitijih karakteristika suvremenog industrijskog čovjeka: gušenje središnjeg zanimanja za ljude, prirodu i žive strukture zajedno sa sve većom sklonošću mehaničkim, neživim artefaktima. Postoji obilje primjera. Diljem cijelog industrijaliziranog svijeta postoje mnogi ljudi koji osjećaju više nježnosti prema svojim automobilima i više zanimanja za njih no za svoje žene. Ponosni su na svoj auto; njeguju ga; peru ga (čak i mnogi od onih koji bi pranje mogli platiti), a u nekim zemljama mu nadijevaju nadimke pune ljubavi; oni ga promatraju i postaju zabrinuti kod najmanjeg simptoma disfunkcije. Auto, bez sumnje, nije seksualni objekt — no on je objekt ljubavi; nekima život bez auta izgleda nepodnošljiviji no život bez žene. Nije li ta sklonost prema automobilima donekle osebujna, ili čak perverzna?

Da je pojam uske veze između analnog karaktera i nekrofilije lako jednostavan kao što sam ga opisao u ovom shematskom izlaganju, ovo bi bilo dovoljno jasno da budemo teorijski zado¬ voljni. Analni karakter, tipičan za srednju klasu devetnaestog stoljeća, postaje sve rjeđi među onim stanovništvom koje je potpuno integrirano u ekonomski najnapredniji oblik proizvodnje. Dok, statistički govoreći, pojava totalnog otuđivanja vjerojatno još ne postoji kod većine američkog stanovništva, ona je karakteristika sektora koji je najindikativniji za pravac u kojem se kreće cijelo društvo. U stvari, karakter novog tipa čovjeka izgleda da ne pristaje u bilo koju od starijih kategorija kao što su oralni, analni ili genitalni karakteri. Pokušao sam taj novi tip shvatiti kao »tržišni karakter (»marketing character«) (E. Fromm, 1947).

Za tržišni karakter sve je transformirano u robu — ne samo stvari, već i sama osoba, njena fizička energija, njene vještine, njeno znanje, njeni nazori, njeni osjećaji, pa čak i osmijesi. Taj karakterni tip je povijesno novi fenomen, jer je proizvod potpuno razvijenog kapitalizma koji je usredotočen na tržište — tržište robe, tržište rada i tržište ličnosti — i čiji je princip stvaranje dobiti uz pomoć povoljne razmjene.

Ovdje se vraćamo pitanju koje je dovelo do digresije. Da li je nekrofilija zaista karakteristična za čovjeka u drugoj polovici dvadesetog stoljeća u Sjedinjenim Američkim Državama i drugim jednako visoko razvijenim kapitalističkim ili državno-kapitalističkim društvima? Taj novi tip čovjeka, na koncu konca, nije zainteresiran za fe kalije i leševe. On se, zapravo, toliko boji leševa da mu se le ševi priviđaju življima no žive osobe. (Izgleda da to nije stvaranje reakcije, već zapravo dio cjelokupne orijentacije koja ne gira prirodu, ne od-čovjeka-učinjenu stvarnost.) Ali on čini nešto mnogo drastičnije. On odvraća svoj interes od života, osoba, prirode, ideja — ukratko od svega što je živo; on sav život pre tvara u stvari, uključujući sebe i manifestaciju svojih ljudskih sposobnosti uma, viđenja, slušanja, kušanja, voljenja. Seksualnost postaje tehnička vještina (»ljubavna mašina«); osjećaji su otupljeni i pokatkad zamijenjeni sentimentalnošću; radost, izraz in tenzivne životnosti, zamijenjena je »zabavom« ili uzbuđenjem; i ako ima neku ljubav ili nježnost, ona je upravljena prema mašinama i spravama. Svijet postaje suma beživotnih artefakata; od sintetičke hrane do sintetičkih organa, cijeli čovjek postaje dio totalne mašinerije kojom on upravlja, ali kojom je istovremeno upravljan. On nema plana, nema svrhe u životu do izvršavanja 180 onog što mu logika tehnike određuje. On teži da napravi robota kao jedno od najvećih dostignuća svog tehničkog uma; neki nas specijalisti uvjeravaju da će se robot jedva razlikovati od živih ljudi. To dostignuće neće izgledati tako zapanjujuće — čovjeka je ionako već teško razlikovati od robota.

Svijet života postao je svijet »neživota«; osobe su postale »neosobe«, svijet smrti. Smrt se više ne izražava neugodno-mirišućim fekalijama ili leševima. Njeni simboli sada su čiste, blještave ma¬ šine; ljude ne privlače smradni zahodi, već strukture aluminija i stakla.24 Ali stvarnost iza te raskužene fasade postaje sve vidlji¬ vija. Čovjek, u ime napretka, transformira svijet u smradno i zatrovano mjesto (i to nije simbolično). On zagađuje zrak, vodu, zemlju, životinje — i sebe. On to čini do tog stupnja da postaje problematično hoće li se na Zemlji moći živjeti za slijedećih sto godina. On zna činjenice, ali usprkos mnogima koji protestiraju, oni koji upravljaju nastavljaju trku za tehničkim »napretkom« i voljni su obožavanju svog idola žrtvovati sav život. Nekada su ljudi također žrtvovali svoju djecu i ratne zarobljenike, ali ni kada ranije čovjek nije bio voljan Molohu žrtvovati sav život — svoj i svojih potomaka. Mala je razlika čini li to namjerno ili ne. Ako nije spoznao moguću opasnost, može biti oslobođen odgovornosti. Ali nekrofilni element u njegovom karakteru sprečava ga da se koristi znanjem koje ima.  

Do sada smo razmatrali vezu: mehaničko-beživotno-analno. Ali teško bi bilo ne sjetiti se jedne druge veze ako razmatramo karakter totalno otuđenog, kibernetskog čovjeka: njegovih shizoidnih ili shizofrenih osobina. Možda je u njemu najupadljivija crta razdor između misli-afekata-volje. (Taj je razdor naveo E. Bleulera kod izbora imenice »shizophrenia« — od grčkog shizo, raskoliti, raspući se; phren, psiha — za taj tip bolesti.) U opisu kibernetskog čovjeka već smo vidjeli neke ilustracije tog razdora (primjer odsustva osjećaja kod pilota bombardera, kombini ranog s jasnim znanjem da pritiskom na dugme ubija stotine tisuća ljudi). Da bismo promatrali tu pojavu, ne moramo ići u takve krajnosti. Već smo je opisali u njenim općenitim manifestacijama. Kibernetski čovjek je gotovo isključivo cerebralno orijentiran: on je rnonocerebralni čovjek. Njegov pristup cijelom svijetu oko njega — i sebi samome — je intelektualan; on želi znati što stvari jesu, kako funkcioniraju i kako mogu biti konstruirane ili upravljane. Taj pristup njeguje znanost i on dominira od kraja srednjeg vijeka. To je sama bit modernog napretka, osnova tehničke dominacije svijetom i masovne potrošnje.
 
 
Postoji li nešto kobno u toj orijentaciji? Zaista, taj aspekt »na pretka« ne bi bio koban da ga ne prate neke tegobne činjenice. Prvo, tu »monocerebralnu« orijentaciju ne nalazimo samo kod onih koji su angažirani naučnim radom; ona je zajednička velikom dijelu stanovništva: činovnicima, prodavačima, inženjerima, liječnicima, direktorima i posebno mnogim intelektualcima i umjetnicima — u stvari, može se nagađati, većini urbanog stanovništva. Svi oni pristupaju svijetu kao konglomeratu stvari koji treba shvatiti da bi se mogle efektno koristiti. Drugo, i ne manje važno, taj cerebralno-intelektualni pristup javlja se zajedno s od sustvom afektivne reakcije. Može se reći da su osjećaji više presahnuli no što su potisnuti; ukoliko su živi, nisu njegovani i relativno su sirovi; poprimaju oblik strasti, kao što je strast za pobjedom da bi se pokazala nadmoć nad drugima, za destrukcijom, ili oblik uzbuđenja u seksu, brzini i galami. Treba dodati još jedan faktor. Monocerebralnog čovjeka karakterizira i ovo značajno svojstvo: posebna vrsta narcisoidnosti po kojoj je samome sebi predmet; svoje tijelo i vještinu — ukratko, sebe samog — doživljava kao instrument uspjeha. Monocerebralni čovjek je toliko dio mašinerije koju je izgradio da su mašine upravo 182 onoliko predmet njegove narcisoidnosti koliko i on sam; zapravo, između njih postoji simbiotički odnos: »ujedinjenje sebe s nekim drugim (ili nekom drugom silom izvan sebe) na takav način da svaki od njih gubi svoj integritet, te postaju uzajamno zavisni.« (E. Fromm, 1941).26 U simbiotičkom smislu priroda više nije majka čovjeka, već je to »sekundarna priroda« koju je on izgradio, mašine koje ga hrane i štite.
 
Druga osobina kibernetskog čovjeka — njegova tendencija da se ponaša na rutiniziran, stereotipiziran i nespontan način — može se naći u drastičnijim oblicima kod mnogih shizofreničnih, opsjednutih stereotipova. Upadljive su sličnosti između shizofreničnih pacijenata i monocerebralnih ljudi; možda su još upadljivije u slici koju pružaju »autistička djeca«, koju je prvi opisao L. Kanner (1944), a kasnije, još opširnije, M. S. Mahler (1968). (Ta¬ kođer vidi raspravu L. Bendera o shizofreničnoj djeci [1942.]) Prema Mahierovkinom opisu autističkog sindroma, najvažnije su ove crte: (1) »gubitak prvobitnog razlikovanja između žive i nežive materije, što von Monakow naziva protodijakriza« (M. S. Mahler, 1968); (2) sklonost neživim predmetima kao što su stolica ili igračka, kombinirana s nesposobnošću da se uspostave veze sa živim osobama, posebno s majkom, koja često izjavljuje da »ne može doprijeti do svoje djece«; (3) opsesivni nagon za promatra¬ njem jednoličnosti koji opisuje Kanner kao klasičnu osobinu dječjeg autizma; (4) intezivna želja za samoćom (»Najupadljivija osobina autističkog djeteta je njegova spektakularna borba protiv svakog zahtjeva za ljudskim, društvenim kontaktom.« [M. S. Mahler, 1968]); (5) upotreba jezika (ako govore) u manipulativne svrhe, ali ne kao sredstva međuljudske komunikacije (»Ta autistička djeca znakovima i gestama naređuju odraslima da im služe kao izvršna ekstenzija polužive ili nežive mehaničke vrste, kao prekidač ili poluga mašine.« [M. S. Mahler, 1968]); (6) Mahler spo¬ minje još jednu crtu koja je od posebnog interesa za moje daljnje primjedbe o sve manjoj važnosti »analnog« kompleksa kod monocerebralnog čovjeka: »Najautističkija djeca relativno su malo opsjednuta svojim tijelom, što uzrokuje njihovu vrlo slabu osjetljivost na bol. Zajedno s tom kathektiokom neosjetljivošću javlja se nedostatak hijerarhijske stratifikacije, zonalne libidinizacije i slijeda.« (M. S. Mahler, 1968)

Počnimo s razmatranjem najjednostavnijih i najočitijih karakteristika suvremenog industrijskog čovjeka: gušenje središnjeg zanimanja za ljude, prirodu i žive strukture zajedno sa sve većom sklonošću mehaničkim, neživim artefaktima. Postoji obilje primjera. Diljem cijelog industrijaliziranog svijeta postoje mnogi ljudi koji osjećaju više nježnosti prema svojim automobilima i više zanimanja za njih no za svoje žene. Ponosni su na svoj auto; njeguju ga; peru ga (čak i mnogi od onih koji bi pranje mogli platiti), a u nekim zemljama mu nadijevaju nadimke pune ljubavi; oni ga promatraju i postaju zabrinuti kod najmanjeg simptoma disfunkcije. Auto, bez sumnje, nije seksualni objekt — no on je objekt ljubavi; nekima život bez auta izgleda nepodnošljiviji no život bez žene. Nije li ta sklonost prema automobilima donekle osebujna, ili čak perverzna?

Kinder Lad wrote:

Gluposti. Jel ovaj zna kako su nekad (oni koji su imali) gajili, mazili, pazili i brinuli se o svojim atovima? I to bilo perverzno?

Man’s life is dichotomized: One part of his life is determined by biologic laws (sexual

gratification, consumption of food, relatedness to nature); the other part of his life is

determined by the machine civilization (mechanical ideas about his own organization, his

superior position in the animal kingdom, his racial or class attitude towards other human

groups, valuations about ownership and non-ownership, science, religion, etc.). His being

an animal and his not being animal, biologic roots on the one hand and technical

development on the other hand, cleave man’s life and thought. All the notions man has

developed about himself are consistently derived from the machine that he has created.

The construction of machines and the use of machines have imbued man with the belief

that he is progressing and developing himself to something ‘higher’, in and through the

machine. But he also invested the machine with an animal-like appearance and

mechanics. The train engine has eyes to see with and legs to run with, a mouth to

consume coal with and discharge openings for slag, levers and other devices for making

sounds. In this way the product of mechanistic technology became the extension of man

himself. In fact, machines do constitute a tremendous extension of man’s biologic

organization. They make him capable of mastering nature to a far greater degree than his

hands alone had enabled him. They give him mastery over time and space. Thus, the

machine became a part of man himself, a loved and highly esteemed part. He dreams

about how these machines make his life easier and will give him a great capacity for

enjoyment. The enjoyment of life with the help of the machine has always been his

dream. And in reality? The machine became, is, and will continue to be his most

dangerous destroyer, if he does not differentiate himself from it.

 

The advance of civilization which was determined by the development of the machine

went hand in hand with a catastrophic misinterpretation of the human biologic

organisation. In the construction of the machine, man followed the laws of mechanics

and lifeless energy. This technology was already highly developed long before man

began to ask how he himself was constructed and organized. When, finally, he dared very

gradually, cautiously and very often under the mortal threat of his fellow man to discover

his own organs, he interpreted their functions in the way he had learned to construct

machines many centuries before. He interpreted them in a mechanistic, lifeless and rigid

way. The mechanistic view of life is a copy of mechanistic civilisation. But living

functioning is fundamentally different; it is not mechanistic. The specific biologic energy,

orgone, obeys laws which are neither mechanical nor electrical.

 

Trapped in a mechanistic picture of the world, man was incapable of grasping the

specifically living, non-mechanistic functioning. Man dreams about one day producing a

homun-culus a la Frankenstein or at least an artificial heart or artificial protein. The

notions of homunculus, which man has developed in his fantasy, project a picture of a

brutal monster, manlike, but mechanically stupid, angular, and possessing powerful

forces, which, if they are set loose, will be beyond control and will automatically cause

havoc. In his film fantasia Walt Disney brilliantly captured this fact. In such fantasies of

himself and his organization, we miss every expression of that which is vitally alive,

kind, social and related to nature. On the other hand, it is striking that man invests the

animals he portrays precisely with those traits he misses in himself and does not give to

his homunculus figures. This, too, is excellently brought out in Disney’s animal films.

 

In his fantasies, man appears as a mechanical, vicious, overbearing, heartless,

inanimate monster, while the animal appears as a social, kind and fully alive creature,

invested with all the human strengths and weaknesses. We have to ask: Does man reflect

a reality in these fantasies? The answer is: Yes. He very vividly portrays his inner

biologic contradiction:

 

1. In ideology: vicious animal - majestic man;

2. In reality: kind, free animal - brutal robot.

 

Thus, the machine has had a mechanical, mechanistic, ‘dulling’, and ‘rigidifying’

effect on man’s conception of his own organisation. This is how man conceives of

himself: The brain is the ‘most consummate product of development’. His brain is a

‘control centre’, which gives the individual organs commands and impulses just as the’

ruler’ of a state orders his’ subjects’ about. The organs of the body are connected with the

master, the ‘brain’, by telegraph wires, the nerves. (A complete misconception naturally,

for the organs of the organism had an expedient biologic function long before there was a

brain in billions of organisms. And as physiology has experimentally proven, the

essential functions of life continue for some time in a dog or chicken from which the

brain has been removed.)

 
Infants have to drink a precise quantity of milk at fixed intervals and have to sleep a
precise number of hours. Their diet has to have exactly x ounces of fat, j ounces of
protein and % ounces of carbohydrates. Until the day of marriage, a man does not have a
sex drive; it begins to operate precisely on this day. God created the world in exactly six
days and rested on the seventh, as man rests from his machines. Children have to study x
hours of mathematics, y hours of chemistry, z hours of zoology, all exactly the same, and
all of them have to acquire the same amount of wisdom. Superior intelligence is equal to
one hundred points, average intelligence to eighty points, stupidity to forty points. With
ninety points one gets a Ph.D., with eighty-nine, one does not.
 
 
Away from the animal; away from sexuality!’ are the guiding principles of the
formation of all human ideology. This is the case whether it is disguised in the fascist
form of racially pure ‘supermen’, the communist form of proletarian class honour, the
Christian form of man’s ‘spiritual and ethical nature’, or the liberal form of ‘higher
human values’. All these ideas harp on the same monotonous tune: ‘We are not animals;
it was we who discovered the machine - not the animal! And we don’t have genitals like
the animals!’ All of this adds up to an overemphasis of the intellect, of the ‘purely’
mechanistic; logic and reason as opposed to instinct; culture as opposed to nature; the
mind as opposed to the body; work as opposed to sexuality; the state as opposed to the
individual; the superior man as opposed to the inferior man.
 
How is it to be explained that of the millions of car drivers, radio listeners, etc., only
very few know the name of the inventor of the car and the radio, whereas every child
knows the name of the generals of the political plague?
 
Natural science is constantly drilling into man’s consciousness that fundamentally he
is a worm in the universe. The political plague-monger is constantly harping upon the
fact that man is not an animal, but a ‘zoon politikon’, i.e., a non-animal, an upholder of
values, a ‘moral being’. How much mischief has been perpetuated by the Platonic
philosophy of the state! It is quite clear why man knows the politicos better than the
natural scientists: He does not want to be reminded of the fact that he is fundamentally a
sexual animal. He does not want to be an animal.
 
Viewed in this way, the animal has no intelligence, but only ‘wicked instincts’; no
culture, but only ‘base drives’; no sense of values, but only ‘material needs’. It is
precisely the human type who sees the whole of life in the making of money who likes to
stress these ‘differences’. If a war as murderous as the present one has any trace of a
rational function, then it is the function of exposing the abysmal irrationality and
mendacity of such ideas. Man would have good reason to be happy if he were as free
from sadism, perversions and meanness, and as filled with a natural spontaneity, as any
one of the animals, whether an ant or an elephant. As vain as man’s assumption was that
the earth is the centre of the universe or the sole inhabited planet, even so unreal and
pernicious was his philosophy that represented the animal as a ‘soulless’ creature devoid
of any morals, indeed, as morally repulsive. If, while professing myself to be a
benevolent saint, I should take an axe and crack my neighbour’s skull, there would be
good reason for putting me in a mental institution or in the electric chair. But this
juxtaposition exactly reflects the contradiction in man between his ideal ‘values’ on the
one hand and his actual behaviour on the other hand. His expressing of this contradiction
in high-sounding sociological formulas such as ‘the century of wars and revolutions’, or’
elevating experiences at the front’, or ‘the highest development of military strategy and
political tactics’, does not in the least alter the fact that it is precisely with respect to his
biological and social organization that man gropes in the dark and is so hopelessly
confused. It is clear that this frame of mind did not evolve naturally; it is the result of the
development of the machine civilization. It is easy to prove that, when the patriarchal
organization of society began to replace the matriarchal organization, suppression and
repression of genital sexuality in children and adolescents were the principal mechanisms
used to adapt the human structure of the authoritarian order. The suppression of nature, of
‘the animal’ in the child, was and has remained the principal tool in the production of
mechanical subjects. Society’s socio-economic development has continued its
mechanical course until today in an independent way. The basis of all ideologic and
cultural formations developed and branched out hand in hand with the socio-economic
development: ‘Away from genitality’ and ‘away from the animal’.

We are in the middle of a technological upheaval that will transform the way society is organized. We must make the right decisions now.

Kinder Lad wrote:

Počnimo s razmatranjem najjednostavnijih i najočitijih karakteristika suvremenog industrijskog čovjeka: gušenje središnjeg zanimanja za ljude, prirodu i žive strukture zajedno sa sve većom sklonošću mehaničkim, neživim artefaktima. Postoji obilje primjera. Diljem cijelog industrijaliziranog svijeta postoje mnogi ljudi koji osjećaju više nježnosti prema svojim automobilima i više zanimanja za njih no za svoje žene. Ponosni su na svoj auto; njeguju ga; peru ga (čak i mnogi od onih koji bi pranje mogli platiti), a u nekim zemljama mu nadijevaju nadimke pune ljubavi; oni ga promatraju i postaju zabrinuti kod najmanjeg simptoma disfunkcije. Auto, bez sumnje, nije seksualni objekt — no on je objekt ljubavi; nekima život bez auta izgleda nepodnošljiviji no život bez žene. Nije li ta sklonost prema automobilima donekle osebujna, ili čak perverzna?

Gluposti. Jel ovaj zna kako su nekad (oni koji su imali) gajili, mazili, pazili i brinuli se o svojim atovima? I to bilo perverzno?

паће wrote:Покупио из СФа... Строс, Рејнолдс и гомила других пре, све до Гибсона па и раније.

Technology," as it finds its way into almost all the discussions of it I have participated in lately, is the sexy rock star of the humanities, and like the rock star is an obfuscation of something else. Talk about technology is also an addiction, as may be seen in the reception of such popular film and television series as Star Wars and Star Trek. (Star Wars generates only one desire--the desire for a sequel.) In popular and academic discourses alike, hiding behind that sexy rock-star, technology, is a much more sinister and powerful figure: the system that surrounds us. If you add the monster’s location in time (during and after the Industrial Revolution), it is clear what is being discussed when most people say "technology." They are politically mystifying a much bigger monster: capitalism in its advanced, industrial phase. Some years ago I read a technophilic book in which the author speculated delightedly about how many sex organs human beings might acquire via surgery. He was even "daring" enough (his own word) to propose that men be given female organs and women male organs. The male friend of mine who had recommended the book (another technophile) thought this an excellent idea. In this way, men and women would understand each other better, he said. Now it is clear to me that men’s and women’s misunderstandings, far from being due to the differences in their sexual organs or their experiences in sexual intercourse per se, are carefully cultivated in the service of sex-caste positions in a very nasty hierarchy. One cannot dissolve the hierarchy by giving people double or triple sexual equipment. Tinkering with the genitalia when the social structure is the problem is like the common science-fictional device of "solving" the quality of life by giving people immortality. The technology-obsessed--including those who read, write, and study SF--must study economics and political analysis.

It is because technology is a mystification for something else that it becomes a kind of autonomous deity which can promise both salvation and damnation. I might add that all the technophobes and technophiles I have ever met are men, a good argument for Ellmann's theory of lunacy. I know of no woman whose attitude to technology (however "technology" is defined) is either the goshwow school so common in the SF of the 1930s and 40s or the technophobia (coupled with hatred of the "modern world") of a D.H. Lawrence, a Norman Mailer, or a Ken Kesey. And "the women I know" include two mathematicians, a computer specialist teaching in University, a biologist, a failed biologist, and a raft of science-fiction writers. The lack of technophobes is fairly simple; return to an idyllic, non-technological past is simply not an option open to women. Some few feminist SF writers (like Sally Gearhart) may appear to want such a return, but they are always careful to replace industrial technology with a "magical" one of their own, rather as André Norton does in her Witch World books. More typical is one frame in The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp, in a feature called "Mei-lin Luftwaffe, Aerial Infant." Industrial society has broken down; one woman's horrified reaction is, "Oh my God! No more tampax, ever?"

lalinea wrote:

Kinder Lad wrote:

Gluposti. Jel ovaj zna kako su nekad (oni koji su imali) gajili, mazili, pazili i brinuli se o svojim atovima? I to bilo perverzno?

Zar ovo nije isti odnos kao i kapetana prema svom brodu, pilota prema svojoj letelici. Ne mislim nuzno danas, sa komercijalnim saobracajem, vec ranije. Kao da taj opis citam. Oduvek je covek bio u stanju da voli nezive objekte, nije to ni novo ni perverzno.

It’s hard to visit a tech site these days without seeing a headline about deep learning for X, and that AI is on the verge of solving all our problems. Gary Marcusremains skeptical.

Marcus, a best-selling author, entrepreneur and professor of psychology at NYU, has spent decades studying how children learn, and believes that throwing more data at problems won’t necessarily lead to progress in areas such as understanding language, not to speak of getting us to AGI — artificial general intelligence.

Marcus is the voice of anti-hype at a time when AI is all the hype, and in 2015 he translated his thinking into a startup, Geometric Intelligence, which uses insights from cognitive psychology to build better-performing, less-data-hungry machine learning systems. The team was acquired by Uber in December to run Uber’s AI labs, where his co-founder Zoubin Ghahramani has now been appointed chief scientist. So what did the tech giant see that was so important?

In an interview for Flux, I sat down with Marcus, who discussed why deep learning is the hammer that’s making all problems look like a nail and why his alternative sparse data approach is so valuable.

We also got into the challenges of being an AI startup competing with the resources of Google, how corporates aren’t focused on what society actually needs from AI, his proposal to revamp the outdated Turing test with a multi-disciplinary AI triathlon and why programming a robot to understand “harm” is so difficult.

Facebook abandoned an experiment after two artificially intelligent programs appeared to be chatting to each other in a strange language only they understood.