What are you reading now? (Chapter 2)

[Clinton Huxley]

When machines start desiring to be other than they are, and worrying about how to achieve it, then they'll be intelligent.

And by the time we realise what's going on, we'll already be superfluous.

[Sean Hayden]

Perhaps. The problem, as far as I see it, is with the word 'intelligence' itself. Sure, we can device systems which allow machines to amass data and implement routines according to sets of (degrees of fuzzy) rules, but are such kinds of statistical analysis and pattern-recognition 'intelligence' as we mean it? No, not really. Mostly the concept of 'artificial intelligence' can be encompassed by the term 'automated pattern recognition' in the same way that most Science Fiction can be encompassed by the term 'engineering fantasy'. When machines start desiring to be other than they are, and worrying about how to achieve it, then they'll be intelligent.

That's what is argued in How To Create A Mind -- it's argued that the neocortex is an amazing pattern recognition machine, and that it plus some other stuff e.g. old brain make up our intelligence.

When machines start desiring to be other than they are, and worrying about how to achieve it, then they'll be intelligent.

This seems like an odd requirement for intelligence, perhaps you meant to say "human" instead? You will wish to be machine, I assure you.

[JimC]

Whatever consciousness they achieve will be very different to ours. Human consciousness is deeply rooted in our mortal flesh, and the bone-deep knowledge of inevitable death...

[Brian Peacock]

...

When machines start desiring to be other than they are, and worrying about how to achieve it, then they'll be intelligent.

This seems like an odd requirement for intelligence, perhaps you meant to say "human" instead? You will wish to be machine, I assure you.

We are intelligent by evolutionary necessity, not by design. The driver of intelligence is the need to survive long enough to fuck. What drives a machine is batteries.

[Rum]

We are intelligent by evolutionary necessity, not by design. The driver of intelligence is the need to survive long enough to fuck. What drives a machine is batteries.

Clearly a 'classic' view, but one could argue that complexity - things like language, the ability to record and transmit information in language, writing and now electronically have enabled our very malleable and plastic brains to do things rather more complex than dodging lions on the savanna using our wits. Does consciousness become more 'complex' I wonder or is it just that what it can access has become more complex.

[Sean Hayden]

...

When machines start desiring to be other than they are, and worrying about how to achieve it, then they'll be intelligent.

This seems like an odd requirement for intelligence, perhaps you meant to say "human" instead? You will wish to be machine, I assure you.

We are intelligent by evolutionary necessity, not by design. The driver of intelligence is the need to survive long enough to fuck. What drives a machine is batteries.

Even among us there is a great deal of diversity between intellects, to the point of leading us to speculate about kinds of intelligence. Perhaps a non-driven intelligence would just be boring.

[DRSB]

I am reading Viktor Pelevin's new book "iPhuck 10", it is written from the point of view of an AI. Viktor Pelevin is hilarious, lots of translations into English.

https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/victor-pelevin
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/4 ... or_Pelevin

[JimC]

Re-reading "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" by Dan Dennett

[Rum]

Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth. A mason building a Cathedral in medieval England. What could go wrong? Great stuff!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pillars-Earth- ... 064&sr=1-3

[DRSB]

Freud: The Making of an Illusion

From the master of Freud debunkers, the book that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator

Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud’s scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin―but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud’s fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers.

A monumental biographical study and a slashing critique, Freud: The Making of an Illusion will stand as the last word on one of the most significant and contested figures of the twentieth century.

[JimC]

I'm re-reading "How the mind works" by Steven Pinker

[Clinton Huxley]

Exposure by Helen Dunmore. It rattles along.

[Sean Hayden]

I'm re-reading "How the mind works" by Steven Pinker

I've got that somewhere. How does he know anyway?

"Overheated" Andrew Guzman.

I picked it up for a few bucks at Half Price books. On the back it says U.S. 29.95. Who's going to pay that to read a 230 page book about what may happen should we experience 2 degrees of warming? Was anyone supposed to read this book?

[Joe]

I'm reading "Bomb Power" by Garry Wills, and just finished, "Killers of the Flower Moon" by David Grann.

[JimC]

I've been re-reading the Hamish MacBeth books of M. C. Beaton