THE TERM “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE” is tautological: all intelligence is artificial, in the sense of being man-made. There is nothing new about the notion of robotic intelligence; from the Golem to Google, we have been haunted by the Cartesian model of the ghost in the machine.
It flourished during the Enlightenment and the Romantic reaction against it — the eras that gave us such utopian visions as Condorcet’s Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain and such nightmarish fantasies as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Then came the computer, which in turn gave us the internet and social media. More than ever before, we are obsessed with the unlimited possibilities of AI, leading to transhumanism, the secularised transcendence of humanity.
Yet there is another, more genuinely humanistic and certainly more humane form of AI, in the sense of a collective yet complementary mind that is more than the sum of its individual parts. I mean, of course, the magazine.
The old AI has one inestimable advantage over the new. However inadequately, magazines generally pay their contributors. The new AI scrapes anything and everything from the internet without paying a penny to the writers whose intellectual property its algorithms harvest.
