The status quo
Kl systems play chess, Go and poker better than humans, are even superior to humans in diagnosing cancer, don't get tired, don't go on strike and have no moods. As rationally as these self-learning systems operate, humans not only feel a little stupid, no.., some would like to see these coolly calculating machines at the levers of power.
According to a survey conducted by the Center for the Governance of Change at IE University in Spain in 2019, one in four Europeans wants to replace politicians with artificial intelligence. Depending on the point of view from which you look at the survey result, this is evidence of poor politician performance or a very under-complex understanding of politics. The idea of a predictable bot, sitting in the presidential office instead of an unpredictable human being does not only seem to have disadvantages when considering the current situation, although the question arises as to which values the computer would be programmed according to and how transparent these parameters would be. But even the programmers cannot look into the black box of an AI.
Thus, AI remains a wonderful, mysterious something. When you look at the progress AI has made in the arts (e.g., DAll E 2) << klick, the question of whether computers can be creative has some validity. AI systems write, paint, and compose like the great masters. For example, a neural network completed Ludwig van Beethoven's Tenth Symphony. The composer had left the world only a few handwritten sketches, but the software, fed with numerous works, learned the musical style by analyzing sound patterns and continued writing the fragments as if Beethoven himself had taken up the pen.
Is it art or artifice? Magic or mathematics? Or an artful combination of both? Is man disenchanted when artifacts can be reduced to mathematical functions? Does Kl expose us in our own formulaic nature? Where will this process of creation end? Will computers one day write the way Pablo Picasso painted? Or paint the way philosophers once wrote? How do we define art and artificiality in the age of machine intelligence, and where do the boundaries lie? Are humans cueing the machine? Are artificial intelligences developing a consciousness? Do they perhaps even already have it? What if we humans don't even notice?
Silicon Valley digital prophets, led by Google's chief engineer Ray Kurzweil, predict a technological singularity, a moment in history when nonbiological intelligence will transcend biological intelligence. Tiny superintelligences will populate the world and unleash infinite technological progress with ever new pattern recognition and problem-solving skills.
When this point in time will be reached, whether it will be 2050 or 2090, the singularity disciples do not specify exactly. That it will come in such a way, however, is considered as determined. With the Singularity, writes Kurzweil in his book - >> Humanity 2.0 - The Singularity approaches (2014) << we will exceed the borders of our biological bodies and brains. We will attain the power over our fate.
The biologistic assumption of this theory is, that the existence of man is based on something comparable like a software. At least Kurzweil is comparing it with that again and again.
"The genetic information difference between chimpanzees and humans consists only in a few hundred thousand bytes",
Kurzweil writes, the human body is an outdated hardware whose "processor", the brain, runs too slowly. In order to process the huge amount of information, humans would have to upgrade themselves to cyborgs with brain implants. In this "man-machine civilization," as Kurzweil calls it, biology and computer science would enter into a symbiotic relationship; human thought would merge with machine intelligence, raising evolution to a new level.
The transhumanist, promise of redemption, which is already alluded to in the book's sub-title (The Singularity Is Near), has above all a temporal dimension.
One phenomenon of his thinking is the techno-deterministic view, which could be said to be fatalistic, which predicts the immutability of the course of time, according to which social action and resistance would be futile.
But in doing so, we might ask ourselves the question: Is that what we want? Do we want to download our brains from the cloud in a few hundred years? Do we want our thoughts to be read out? Doesn't the vision of a hyperintelligence in 2099 seem strangely outdated, when the stupidity of a resource-intensive growth society will fall on our feet in just a few years? Is autonomy, one of the most important pillars of an open and free society, crumbling with the mechanization of man?
Can it be that Singularity is merely a secret sign for an authoritarian vision of equating and reprogramming man?
The "Great Replacement". << klick
However, it is remarkable that some of those who propagate human enhancement, i.e. an extension of the human body by computer chips or chemical substances, are financed by the big players of that industry which earns its money by exploiting biological weaknesses:
Cell phone apps dock at the reward center of our brain and, by releasing dopamine, ensure that we pick up the device more and more often. Like pigeons in a Skinner box, the conditioned user pecks at the glass pane of his smartphone display in search of grains of information. Former Google developer and design ethicist Tristan Harris argues that tech companies are hijacking our brains, which evolved thousands of years ago on the savannah. The fact that we receive updates every five minutes about what other people think of us makes "no evolutionary sense.
There are few shades of gray in the public debate between belief in technology and hostility to technology, but at this point it is worth noting that our model of civilization runs counter to our biological needs: Noise, smog, fast food, the not quite species-appropriate caging in residential and office towers - humans are not made for this.
The Corona pandemic demonstrates to a highly technical industrial society, which has largely banished nature and substituted it with artificial light, rubber plants, analog cheese, etc., that man is a biological organism whose "code" has a few too many bugs to be able to simply install the next update. The question is, and here we are again on the subject of intelligence, whether it is really so wise to shut down biology - or whether it would not be more intelligent to make our environment more biological, i.e. more natural. Not to disregard the point of many critics and philosophers, whether it is at all possible to continue the so-called human mind without its fragile biochemical body in a similar/human way.
There are many forms of intelligence in nature. Animal intelligence, for example. Dogs can sniff out diseases such as breast or prostate cancer, diabetes and Parkinson's disease in humans. They can smell a sock to see if someone has malaria. Dogs have up to two hundred million olfactory cells and can perceive odors ten thousand times better than humans. A dog's nose currently beats any chemical sensor.
Scientists suspect that animals even possess a previously unexplored sixth sense that allows them to predict natural disasters. Trees are connected to an underground network of plant roots and fungal filaments, the so-called Wood Wide Web << klick, through which not only nutrients but also information is exchanged. So we still have a lot to learn from nature. But are we, as a human species, intelligent enough to define intelligence?
As part of the Human Brain Project << klick , researchers have been trying for decades to understand the human brain with the help of supercomputers. But neuroscientists still don't know exactly how our brains work. But they claim they are close.
Philosopher John Searle has raised a number of objections to the singularity thesis:
Kurzweil confuses simulation with duplication, he assumes that with enough computing power, a consciousness automatically develops. But just because a computer simulates intelligence or consciousness, it does not follow that it also possesses it.
In the discourse about Kl, it is generally forgotten that artificial intelligence is a product of human intelligence and that we have already created several innovations with our supposedly limited computing power that have contributed significantly to the progress of civilization. Think of book printing, electricity, vaccines, and last but not least: computers. We are very good at analyzing the geophysical processes on our planet, but also very good at ignoring these findings in our everyday lives. Writes John Searle.
Thereby Searle always assigns something mystical, not calculable to the human existence. Kurzweil, however, compares the human brain with its synapses, through which electrical signals are sent, with processors, which, due to their biochemical processes, will no longer be able to keep up with the machines in the future.
The mathematician Irving John Good, wrote in his book, "Speculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine" from 1965 to this toppic. "Since the building of machines is such an activity, a man-made ultra-intelligent machine could logically build even more intelligent machines; it would unquestionably come to an "intelligence explosion" which would leave human intelligence far behind.
That is why the ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention man will ever have to make."
There are three major currents currently recognizable in Silicon Valley.
1
Those who are researching a superintelligence detached from humans in order to be able to solve the questions of the universe for us.
2
Those, including Elon Musk, who are researching to improve humans further and further in order to have improved the brain to the extent that humans can keep up with the artificial "superintelligence" at the upcoming singularity with the help of technical improvements. For this he founded the company "Neuralink". << klick
3
And those, to whom one can also count Rey Kurzweil, the inventor of the keyboard, who directly prophesy the posthumanism in the form of a new evolutionary stage, whatever that will be, or consciously work towards it.
WE ARE ALL AN EXPRESSION OF A PROCESS WHICH IS BEYOND OUR MINDS
Kl systems play chess, Go and poker better than humans, are even superior to humans in diagnosing cancer, don't get tired, don't go on strike and have no moods. As rationally as these self-learning systems operate, humans not only feel a little stupid, no.., some would like to see these coolly calculating machines at the levers of power.
According to a survey conducted by the Center for the Governance of Change at IE University in Spain in 2019, one in four Europeans wants to replace politicians with artificial intelligence. Depending on the point of view from which you look at the survey result, this is evidence of poor politician performance or a very under-complex understanding of politics. The idea of a predictable bot, sitting in the presidential office instead of an unpredictable human being does not only seem to have disadvantages when considering the current situation, although the question arises as to which values the computer would be programmed according to and how transparent these parameters would be. But even the programmers cannot look into the black box of an AI.
Thus, AI remains a wonderful, mysterious something. When you look at the progress AI has made in the arts (e.g., DAll E 2) << klick, the question of whether computers can be creative has some validity. AI systems write, paint, and compose like the great masters. For example, a neural network completed Ludwig van Beethoven's Tenth Symphony. The composer had left the world only a few handwritten sketches, but the software, fed with numerous works, learned the musical style by analyzing sound patterns and continued writing the fragments as if Beethoven himself had taken up the pen.
Is it art or artifice? Magic or mathematics? Or an artful combination of both? Is man disenchanted when artifacts can be reduced to mathematical functions? Does Kl expose us in our own formulaic nature? Where will this process of creation end? Will computers one day write the way Pablo Picasso painted? Or paint the way philosophers once wrote? How do we define art and artificiality in the age of machine intelligence, and where do the boundaries lie? Are humans cueing the machine? Are artificial intelligences developing a consciousness? Do they perhaps even already have it? What if we humans don't even notice?
Silicon Valley digital prophets, led by Google's chief engineer Ray Kurzweil, predict a technological singularity, a moment in history when nonbiological intelligence will transcend biological intelligence. Tiny superintelligences will populate the world and unleash infinite technological progress with ever new pattern recognition and problem-solving skills.
When this point in time will be reached, whether it will be 2050 or 2090, the singularity disciples do not specify exactly. That it will come in such a way, however, is considered as determined. With the Singularity, writes Kurzweil in his book - >> Humanity 2.0 - The Singularity approaches (2014) << we will exceed the borders of our biological bodies and brains. We will attain the power over our fate.
The biologistic assumption of this theory is, that the existence of man is based on something comparable like a software. At least Kurzweil is comparing it with that again and again.
"The genetic information difference between chimpanzees and humans consists only in a few hundred thousand bytes",
Kurzweil writes, the human body is an outdated hardware whose "processor", the brain, runs too slowly. In order to process the huge amount of information, humans would have to upgrade themselves to cyborgs with brain implants. In this "man-machine civilization," as Kurzweil calls it, biology and computer science would enter into a symbiotic relationship; human thought would merge with machine intelligence, raising evolution to a new level.
The transhumanist, promise of redemption, which is already alluded to in the book's sub-title (The Singularity Is Near), has above all a temporal dimension.
One phenomenon of his thinking is the techno-deterministic view, which could be said to be fatalistic, which predicts the immutability of the course of time, according to which social action and resistance would be futile.
But in doing so, we might ask ourselves the question: Is that what we want? Do we want to download our brains from the cloud in a few hundred years? Do we want our thoughts to be read out? Doesn't the vision of a hyperintelligence in 2099 seem strangely outdated, when the stupidity of a resource-intensive growth society will fall on our feet in just a few years? Is autonomy, one of the most important pillars of an open and free society, crumbling with the mechanization of man?
Can it be that Singularity is merely a secret sign for an authoritarian vision of equating and reprogramming man?
The "Great Replacement". << klick
However, it is remarkable that some of those who propagate human enhancement, i.e. an extension of the human body by computer chips or chemical substances, are financed by the big players of that industry which earns its money by exploiting biological weaknesses:
Cell phone apps dock at the reward center of our brain and, by releasing dopamine, ensure that we pick up the device more and more often. Like pigeons in a Skinner box, the conditioned user pecks at the glass pane of his smartphone display in search of grains of information. Former Google developer and design ethicist Tristan Harris argues that tech companies are hijacking our brains, which evolved thousands of years ago on the savannah. The fact that we receive updates every five minutes about what other people think of us makes "no evolutionary sense.
There are few shades of gray in the public debate between belief in technology and hostility to technology, but at this point it is worth noting that our model of civilization runs counter to our biological needs: Noise, smog, fast food, the not quite species-appropriate caging in residential and office towers - humans are not made for this.
The Corona pandemic demonstrates to a highly technical industrial society, which has largely banished nature and substituted it with artificial light, rubber plants, analog cheese, etc., that man is a biological organism whose "code" has a few too many bugs to be able to simply install the next update. The question is, and here we are again on the subject of intelligence, whether it is really so wise to shut down biology - or whether it would not be more intelligent to make our environment more biological, i.e. more natural. Not to disregard the point of many critics and philosophers, whether it is at all possible to continue the so-called human mind without its fragile biochemical body in a similar/human way.
There are many forms of intelligence in nature. Animal intelligence, for example. Dogs can sniff out diseases such as breast or prostate cancer, diabetes and Parkinson's disease in humans. They can smell a sock to see if someone has malaria. Dogs have up to two hundred million olfactory cells and can perceive odors ten thousand times better than humans. A dog's nose currently beats any chemical sensor.
Scientists suspect that animals even possess a previously unexplored sixth sense that allows them to predict natural disasters. Trees are connected to an underground network of plant roots and fungal filaments, the so-called Wood Wide Web << klick, through which not only nutrients but also information is exchanged. So we still have a lot to learn from nature. But are we, as a human species, intelligent enough to define intelligence?
As part of the Human Brain Project << klick , researchers have been trying for decades to understand the human brain with the help of supercomputers. But neuroscientists still don't know exactly how our brains work. But they claim they are close.
Philosopher John Searle has raised a number of objections to the singularity thesis:
Kurzweil confuses simulation with duplication, he assumes that with enough computing power, a consciousness automatically develops. But just because a computer simulates intelligence or consciousness, it does not follow that it also possesses it.
In the discourse about Kl, it is generally forgotten that artificial intelligence is a product of human intelligence and that we have already created several innovations with our supposedly limited computing power that have contributed significantly to the progress of civilization. Think of book printing, electricity, vaccines, and last but not least: computers. We are very good at analyzing the geophysical processes on our planet, but also very good at ignoring these findings in our everyday lives. Writes John Searle.
The mathematician Irving John Good, wrote in his book, "Speculations concerning the first ultraintelligent machine" from 1965 to this toppic. "Since the building of machines is such an activity, a man-made ultra-intelligent machine could logically build even more intelligent machines; it would unquestionably come to an "intelligence explosion" which would leave human intelligence far behind.
That is why the ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention man will ever have to make."
There are three major currents currently recognizable in Silicon Valley.
Those who are researching a superintelligence detached from humans in order to be able to solve the questions of the universe for us.
Those, including Elon Musk, who are researching to improve humans further and further in order to have improved the brain to the extent that humans can keep up with the artificial "superintelligence" at the upcoming singularity with the help of technical improvements. For this he founded the company "Neuralink". << klick
And those, to whom one can also count Rey Kurzweil, the inventor of the keyboard, who directly prophesy the posthumanism in the form of a new evolutionary stage, whatever that will be, or consciously work towards it.
WE ARE ALL AN EXPRESSION OF A PROCESS WHICH IS BEYOND OUR MINDS