The brazen head of artificial intelligence...
drinking coffee, running a few miles, and a Sunday brunch
Sundays I browse around my office and organize the week ahead. I don’t always know how thoughts will coalesce so I sit with them for a minute. I recommend anything by Ian McGilchrist if you have the interest or capacity to deeply understand the left and right brain hemispheres in the context of the world writ large. These differences impact how we build and view societies and our cultural landscape. There is a density to these powerful ideas but you have numerous points of entry through either written word such as The Master and His Emissary, interviews and a Substack, The Matter With Things, that evokes contemplation in slightly more bite size pieces.
A recent podcast interview included a masterful distinction between what it means to know something. Relevant in discussions about AI and its touted potential benefits and insights, is the lack of distinction in our English language between different types of knowing.
In French, to know something from the inside — really know it — is savoir. A distinctly different version of knowing more aligned with familiarity is connaître. We should understand the difference as the praises ascend for the potential of the future benefits of AI. To truly know, in the savoir sense, is not something possible with technical advancements such as AI.
But what you are getting is not really in essence, any different from the brazen heads that were made in the late 18th century that could speak. So they’d have a head and it could move and a tongue and it would say things and this is fine.
I mean, of course it’s vastly more sophisticated, but all it has done is approach asymptotically, a reality. But it can only ever do it asymptotically. And as long as it’s on the other side of the chasm, it never can reach it. — Ian McGilchrist, The Great Simplification podcast.
I like the analogy of automatons*. They appear to be humanistic in their performances but we know they lack the ability to internalize and synthesize thoughts from their societal, cultural and everyday experiences. They are mimetic in every way.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazen_head
I am confronted with my duality every day. In real time I am disgusted with the debris we leave in space while thinking nothing of sending up new satellites at the drop of a hat.
Impossible to escape AI in our modern era. It exists below your cognition. We can check boxes and remove access but make no mistake, we have become the cats thrown in with the pigeons.
Things I am reading or listening to…
Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models
