[FRIAM] the arc of ai (was Re: Whew!)

[Steven A Smith]

Glen/Marcus -

As usual, I am enjoying watching your semantic and conceptual fencing 
match here.  The flash of parry, riposte, counter-riposte can be 
blinding but engaging.   The content, when I feel I have parsed it down 
all the way is usually enlightening and informative.

Rather than try to join in and thus create a bit of a melee, I will try 
to stand back and lob a few things onto the ground of the discussion.

Firstly, my own throwdown of "rhetoric" was intended to be very 
specific.  I believe that you both took it to be a bit more broad than 
intended.  I specifically meant rhetoric as "language intended to 
persuade".  I hold this specifically distinct from "language intended to 
inform" and "language used to think or contemplate".  Unfortunately I 
discovered that in fact the formal definition of rhetoric includes "to 
inform" as well as "to persuade"

I believe that both of you are primarily using language intended to 
inform in this (and most if not all) discussions in this forum.   But I 
also believe that MOST public discourse is fundamentally rhetorical.   
Noam Chomsky might be the closest to a public figure outside of hard 
sciences who seems able to refrain from deliberately conflating 
persuasive and informational language.

My point in this pivots around Marcus' point here of "Listeners, bear 
some responsibility too".  In my general experience, but acutely 
informed by our recent elections, MOST listeners seek out persuasive 
rhetoric which supports their existing beliefs... and ignore or at least 
are fairly unaware of the difference of that from informational 
rhetoric.   They are not seeking to understand or even learn more, they 
are seeking to confirm existing biases and to adopt convincing rhetoric 
to flail their opponents with.

I particularly appreciate the discussions the two of you share with the 
rest of us here, but there are many (or at least several) others who 
seem to maintain a similar level of honest intent to inform and/or 
explore rather than simply persuade.

Touching briefly onthe OP or is it OT, I thnk that both SAI and GAI may 
be a severe travesty in our culture to whatever extent we "listeners" 
don't take responsibility.   Will AI become the new speechwriters?   
Have they already?   I think that Artificial Wisdom will come much later 
than effective Artificial Intelligence and would seem to need to grow 
out of GAI rathr than SAI.

Carry On,

  - Steve


> Glen write:
>
> "Their interpretation of their distributed artifact is decoupled from, abstracted from, their audience's interpretation of the same artifact.  And they bear some responsibility for that decoupling."
>
> Listeners bear responsibility too.
>
> Marcus
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove