Human intelligence takes over where machine intelligence leaves off. Machine intelligence takes over where human intelligence leaves off. The two systems are at least in theory if not always in practice mutually complementary to one another, except when people begin mixing their metaphors of “Artificial” and “Intelligence,” which we have a strong tendency to do given the nature and structure of our linguistic intelligence. However powerful an A.I. algorithm or system might be, it is left to people to distinguish between real intuitive sentience and the simulation, however complex and sophisticated seeming, of such seemingly intuitive sentience.
I know my competition on this “Bloggishing” web-site. It is not the potential time of potentially interested readership who are too busy surfing and now “X-ing” the rest of web-world to bother with my Internet-conventional and mostly anachronistic “pages.” It is not even other Bloggers most of whom are both better writers and better published than myself. It is in fact not even the big Internet companies that are building these new “Chat” A.I. systems that purportedly can do miracles in simulating productive human consciousness. The competition is in fact these third and forth generation ELIZA like machine learning systems based upon advanced AI systems and technologies. My competition are machines, and most people today would prefer interacting with a seemingly alive and semi-intelligent machine than with a real other person, however dull or interesting the latter may really be.
My real competition for this aging doddering fool is a bloody sophisticated machine owned by a modern capitalist Ayn Randian “Howard Roark.” And it is really no competition at all because it is a game that someone like myself, of my age set, cannot even play well, much less expect to win. When and if I read someone else’s blog, I want to know and be sure that the blog was actually written by a real person on the other end of a two way computer terminal system, and not the plagiarized knock-off work of some Cyber “bot” or some criminal human cyber freak.
So perhaps we must again take heed Joseph Weizenbaum’s warning to the modern world made almost a half Century ago (“Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation,” Freeman & Company, 1976.) ELIZA was the epitome of simulated “true” artificial intelligence, functioning upon a seemingly intuitive and largely tacit level, but only projectively simulated in as much as it was received by and deceiving of sentient others who for a moment at least lapse in their own sentient judgment. The development of sophisticated and power modern AI will continue to leap light-years ahead, but it should not obscure as a developmental priority the fact or the facticity of human development.
What I have celebrated through my life’s work, however mediocre by modern standards, has been the basic honesty and value of human development and the development of truly human systems as a fundamental priority of our modern world, divested of any other “technological” considerations. In this regard, there is no other significant competition at all in my own little world at least, as this Blog will evidentially attest, except with my own self and my own limitations and weaknesses, of which there have been many.
The ultimate paradox perhaps is that I am all for Artificial Intelligence and advanced Robotics, as long as we do not over anthropomorphize it all. Advanced A.I. has its place, but that is not in substitution of or for human intelligence. A.I. as part of a larger human system, increasingly autonomous in function, has a critical role to play in the future development and facilitation of human systems, especially in terms of real working systems, except when it may potentially interfere with or promote technological development in lieu of the greater realization of human development.