Thanks for this, John. Your conclusion reminds me a lot of some things that Hubert Dreyfus said in his early critiques of AI. You should check out his stuff if you haven't already!
Love this piece so much. I have been wanting, trying, working, all the things to articulate these ideas for quite a while now and you just did it so well here. This "Oz-like' tech is worth something; but it is a technology of 'seeming' or simulation. It is sort of simulating producing the thing; like a myth that needs to be demythologized. This idea that it can (and should) produce the thing or do the thing is not quite right; I think it can be helpful as a metacognitive co-thinking tool, but we need to be very, very careful about all the things you point to in this amazing piece. This one is spot on!
Thank you for this post! I haven’t read The Watchmen, but the attempt to visualize dimensions in the panel reminds me of A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle where one of the characters is describing a tesseract through a discussion of the multiple dimensions. It’s illustrated in the book and graphic novel in a kind of helpful way (as an ant traveling on a line but where the front and end points meet and the ant skips the in between). Both examples point to the impossibility of explaining what happens between the starting and ending point of time travel or AI thinking: it’s fuzzy and the fuzzy unknowable part requires some kind of faith—in machines and billion dollar companies and expert programmers? Disturbing😳
Thanks for this, John. Your conclusion reminds me a lot of some things that Hubert Dreyfus said in his early critiques of AI. You should check out his stuff if you haven't already!
I have but I should go back and reread the 1992 book (the sequel I think is really timeless)
Love this piece so much. I have been wanting, trying, working, all the things to articulate these ideas for quite a while now and you just did it so well here. This "Oz-like' tech is worth something; but it is a technology of 'seeming' or simulation. It is sort of simulating producing the thing; like a myth that needs to be demythologized. This idea that it can (and should) produce the thing or do the thing is not quite right; I think it can be helpful as a metacognitive co-thinking tool, but we need to be very, very careful about all the things you point to in this amazing piece. This one is spot on!
Thank you for this post! I haven’t read The Watchmen, but the attempt to visualize dimensions in the panel reminds me of A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle where one of the characters is describing a tesseract through a discussion of the multiple dimensions. It’s illustrated in the book and graphic novel in a kind of helpful way (as an ant traveling on a line but where the front and end points meet and the ant skips the in between). Both examples point to the impossibility of explaining what happens between the starting and ending point of time travel or AI thinking: it’s fuzzy and the fuzzy unknowable part requires some kind of faith—in machines and billion dollar companies and expert programmers? Disturbing😳