The Juvet Agenda

Fair Warning — Real Life

Abeba Birhane has written an excellent historical overview of the original Artificial Intelligence movement, including Weizenbaum’s aboutface, and the current continuation of technological determinism.

Empty Pointers and Constellations of AI

AI becomes a stand-in term for whatever technologies and techniques are new, shiny, and just beyond the grasp of our understanding. We use it to gesture at a future we cannot fully comprehend or currently realise. As soon as we do, it will no longer be “AI.”

Why Computers Won’t Make Themselves Smarter | The New Yorker

In this piece published a year ago, Ted Chiang pours cold water on the idea of a bootstrapping singularity.

How much can you optimize for generality? To what extent can you simultaneously optimize a system for every possible situation, including situations never encountered before? Presumably, some improvement is possible, but the idea of an intelligence explosion implies that there is essentially no limit to the extent of optimization that can be achieved. This is a very strong claim. If someone is asserting that infinite optimization for generality is possible, I’d like to see some arguments besides citing examples of optimization for specialized tasks.

Artifice and Intelligence

Whatever the merit of the scientific aspirations originally encompassed by the term “artificial intelligence,” it’s a phrase that now functions in the vernacular primarily to obfuscate, alienate, and glamorize.

Do “cloud” next!

Norbert Wiener’s Human Use of Human Beings is more relevant than ever.

What would Wiener think of the current human use of human beings? He would be amazed by the power of computers and the internet. He would be happy that the early neural nets in which he played a role have spawned powerful deep-learning systems that exhibit the perceptual ability he demanded of them—although he might not be impressed that one of the most prominent examples of such computerized Gestalt is the ability to recognize photos of kittens on the World Wide Web.