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Despite the way it is often framed and critiqued, artificial intelligence is not really “artificial” or “alien”: in the usual mystification process of ideology,
by xaedes 7y ago
Despite the way it is often framed and critiqued, artificial intelligence is not really “artificial” or “alien”: in the usual mystification process of ideology, it appears to be a deus ex machina that descends to the world like in ancient theater. But this hides the fact that it actually emerges from the intelligence of this world.
What people call “AI” is actually a long historical process of crystallizing collective behavior, personal data, and individual labor into privatized algorithms that are used for the automation of complex tasks: from driving to translation, from object recognition to music composition. Just as much as the machines of the industrial age grew out of experimentation, know-how, and the labor of skilled workers, engineers, and craftsmen, the statistical models of AI grow out of the data produced by collective intelligence.
I can totally resonate with that part
- ralphstodomingo 7y agoQuite a nice excerpt, will be reading the article now. We almost always discount the work done by our predecessors: NIH-syndrome/"reinventing the wheel" vs "standing in the shoulders of giants", and this was a humble reminder for me.
- gumby 7y ago> We almost always discount the work done by our predecessors: NIH-syndrome/"reinventing the wheel" vs "standing in the shoulders of giants", and this was a humble reminder for me. "We" being computer scientists (or computing) which for some reason has this disease, perhaps due to the field's newness? When I worked in the life sciences (pharmaceutical chemistry) the literature was the first place we looked. Whereas when working at a research lab in my 20s: I would often go down to our library and read CACM, IEEE journal et al and would sometimes implement things I read there. Even though I would brandish a photocopy of the journal article and reference it in the source code my boss and colleagues would praise me for "thinking up" a solution to a given problem. Ironically the Internet changed things dramatically in the physical sciences (in Physics especially* but in other physical sciences by making it much easier to both search and read the literature) whereas in non-academic computing it's been the small conferences and, to my surprise, Youtube. * Physics has long been an innovator in information dissemination; when journal publishing got too slow and letters too point-to-point it gave rise to Physics Letters, which itself became a pair of journals....
- carapace 7y agoTuring machines are essentially automation of Turing's thought processes, so, in a way, computers have always been AI.