[FRIAM] Fwd: [MEA] Wash. Post op-ed on AI

Mon Jun 20 12:17:34 EDT 2022

Something for Nick?

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Clinton Ignatov <clintonthegeek at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Jun 20, 2022 at 1:42 PM
Subject: Re: [MEA] Wash. Post op-ed on AI
To: <mea at lists.ibiblio.org>

This is in my wheel house, so I'll type up some thoughts here. :) The
only sure way to address the mis-attribution of intelligence to machines
is to understand machines as machines, which is something we're exactly
/not /doing.

The opaqueness of proprietary, black-box, consumer-marketed commodity
computers has inevitably lead to people only appreciating them /as/ the
metaphors which are used to render them familiar. Whereas a metaphor is
four parts: a relation of one figure/ground to another, such at A is to
B as C is to D, all of the socially-constructed language and terms which
are used to discuss computers are flattened two a single gestalt of
marketing terms.

The high-level interface, or "design" or "user experience" is all that
consumers are allowed/encouraged to know or understand or learn. And
that's all fictional content, created by digital "artists." The language
is so corrupted with illusion and lies that very-few people actually
develop the perception necessary to actually physically sense what a
computer is and what it's doing in any real sense. People talk about
"information processing" as though information were a substance like air
or ether or electrons or the 'geist' of the Zeitgeist which "flows" about.

Vacuum tube machines and the soldered-together projects you see from
photos of the Home Brew Computer Club in the '70s—where Jobs and
Wozniak, for instance, brought their first Apple demo—were at least
large and slow enough to recognize as completely physical machines. A
computer is /completely/ a mechanical chunk of /physical/ matter
ka-chunking through various states deterministically in accordance to
the logic of the /physical /layout of its parts to the beat of a clock.
Nobody would argue that a bunch of tooth-picks on a table rotated about
in patterns could think, or talk, or be sentient. But for some-reason
you shrink them down and move them really, really fast, and suddenly
society starts arguing about toothpick ethics!

The unethical thing has been the complete and utter failure at every
level of society to maintain the culture of computer education. I grew
up in the '90s learning computers wrong owing to the influx of Apple's
into the classroom. If my dad hadn't teaching me basic electronics and
if I hadn't jumped ship to GNU/Linux on my own, I'd have never, ever
learned what computers were as physical devices. It would have otherwise
been impossible to escape the absolute sludge of animism and
superstition inherent in all the terms used in media and school which
reify computer content, "information," into some kind of fifth classical
element.

I love McLuhan, but the naive application his analogue-era
differentiation between electric devices and mechanical devices has done
a great disservice to understanding media here. From my reading,
electric devices in his sense are communication machines. And, of
course, computers have absolutely /nothing/ to do with communications.
Any use of computers /for/ communications is entirely a matter of
content. Computers existed offline forever, and can and will continue to
do so. What computers did was replace buildings full of mathematicians
sitting at desks crunching numbers in various businesses and state
facilities (i.e. "running the numbers," or processing information) like
accountants and statisticians and what-not. The effects of that work
are, to my mind, much more in line with the mechanical, typographical
world of the Gutenberg era—the world behind McLuhan's Mechanical
Bride—than the electric world of the telegraph.

It's the /analogue/ world which feels alive and electric, because there
was always people on both sides of it. The attribution of consciousness
or intelligence to the "spirit of radio" or "life-likeness" of film or
gossip-like flow of analogue information across wires may has only been
virtualized within computer simulation. And with simulation, there is no
longer the guarentee that it's another real human on the other side
which was definitely true for a telephone call. That's what feel's
"alive" to people: the colourful animations of our high-density, tactile
displays and other interfaces which obscure the actual machine. The
Turing Test depended entirely on hiding the machine/other person from
view behind such an ambiguous interface.

All the theoretical conversations in the world about "the nature of
intelligence" or whatever are doomed to irrelevancy so-long as people
don't begin taking apart their machines, learning their elementary logic
gates, and actually building /into their entire body and embodied
sensory life/ a /postive/ definition of what computers are. Only then
will the metaphorical language we use to discuss computers become again
a proper metaphor: the situation being described /by/ the metaphor will
be apprehended through it, instead of replaced by it.

Clinton
ConcernedNetizen.com

On 2022-06-19 09:04, jmcdaid wrote:
> The authors articulate significant critiques. The paper I was scheduled
to deliver next month at MEA (before I freaked out about international
travel right now) bears directly on this question, and argues that because
of our inbuilt biases toward pattern detection and theory of mind, we have
a long history of fooling ourselves like this.
>
> Applying media ecological analysis and a bit of posthumanism (in
particular, Katherine Hayles’ recent work — her suggestion for a better way
to categorize ‘intelligent’ systems is “non-conscious cognizers”) would
help avoid embarrassing Clever Hans pratfalls.
>
> For those interested,http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.31499.57125
> ---------------------------
> John McDaid
> @jmcdaid
> johnmcdaid.com
>
>
>
>
>
>> On Jun 19, 2022, at 7:50 AM, Lance Strate<strate at fordham.edu>  wrote:
>>
>> “We warned Google that people might believe AI was sentient. Now it’s
>> happening.” Curious as to folk’s views on the controversy?
>>
>>
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/google-ai-ethics-sentient-lemoine-warning/?utm_campaign=wp_week_in_ideas&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_ideas&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F372065c%2F62af021ecfe8a21601b36e70%2F5e76228dade4e21f59d03f70%2F14%2F71%2F62af021ecfe8a21601b36e70&wp_cu=df402a1839eedea70a5234de3acc3622%7CC0D6D858BA704203E0430100007FC096
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-- 
============================================
Tom Johnson - tom at jtjohnson.com
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --     Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
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