[FRIAM] Writing and Civilization and AI, oh my!

[Marcus Daniels]

Which of this cannot be encoded digitally by a robot?

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, July 26, 2024 12:12 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Writing and Civilization and AI, oh my!

I agree with one small caveat. Artifacts; tangible, written, stigmergic, ... are but a small part of what is "cooperatively constructed and kneaded." The vast majority of what an individual "knows" and the vast majority of what the 'collective' "knows" is tacit, 'in-the-mind' and transmitted orally and/or by non-formal means.

davew


On Fri, Jul 26, 2024, at 12:18 PM, glen wrote:
> Similarly, but a bit larger in scope, humans (and other animals) are 
> merely small parts of a larger system. The extent to which any one 
> person actually knows anything (much less is wise about anything) is 
> negligible, on the same order as that which a chimpanzee knows or is 
> wise about something. What's *valuable*, worth preserving, are the 
> cooperatively constructed and kneaded stigmergic cultural artifacts.
>
> But unlike Plato's straw man, suggesting the artifacts are somehow 
> fixed and repetitive, what's interesting about them is a) their 
> re-interpretation through successive generations and b) the 
> derivations spawned from them. Decay and derivation are more 
> informative than preservation. No single artifact (including flora and 
> fauna, knowledge or wisdom) matters. What matters is the milieu, 
> co-mediated by artifacts like math and painting.
>
> On 7/26/24 09:14, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> *< *Particularly galling to me is the deprecation and dismissal of 
>> any human knowledge, wisdom, experience ... that cannot be reduced to 
>> mere words and abstract symbols. The epitome of this is the conceit 
>> that AI—which is nothing more than the algorithmic manipulation of 
>> abstract meaningless tokens is somehow "equivalent" to human 
>> intelligence.>
>> 
>> The conceit of humans, thinking their low energy, low frequency, lossy biochemical system can compete with tens of thousands of 80 billion-transistor GPUs each running a billion operations a second.
>
>
> --
> ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>
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