#artificial

But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you? People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#artificial-intelligence #computers #personhood #technology #turing

But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially. ↗

— Jacques Lacan

#arrangement #artificially #broken #could #emphasis

French design hardly exists, except as artificial modernism. ↗

— Christian Lacroix

#design #except #exists #french #hardly

All men are created Equal. Some just have more Splenda. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#equality #funny #humanity #humor #inequality

I think they are a better race than humans ever were. ↗

— Angelo Tsanatelis

#cyberpunk #cyborg #genetic-engineering #science-fiction #intelligence

To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity. ↗

— Brian Christian

#human-nature #intelligence

They’re called sock puppets. We create armies of artificial online personas – user accounts that espouse views certain interested parties want espoused. We flood forums, online comment sections, social media. ... It’s amazing what a few people and a little money can accomplish online. Our puppets have turned whole elections. … Everything the public sees is managed. If there’s a valuable brand to protect – whether it’s a person or a dish soap – these fuckers are out there protecting it, shaping the narrative. I mean… who the hell follows dish soap on Twitter? How does anyone believe that shit’s real? (p. 292-294) ↗

— Daniel Suarez

#artificial #computer #election #internet #manipulation

He said he didn’t think Lenore should go to the G.O.D. "Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that," he said, "People don’t go to a place like that to look for other people. That’s the opposite of the whole concept that’s behind the thing. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#desert #religion #religion

Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools. ↗

— Henri Bergson

#especially #faculty #intelligence #make #making

Maybe we should have known that night in Denver that things that begin with plywood Greek columns and artificial smoke typically don't end well. Maybe the Hollywood stars and the glamour blinded us a little: you thought it was the glare, some of us thought it was a halo. ↗

— Artur Davis

#begin #blinded #columns #denver #end