Douglas Hofstadter discusses his origins and the future with AI

Philosophy
#1

Kind of a chilling interview with Douglas, but well worth listening to.

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#2

What a disappointment - I use to have a high consideration for him
 But no, just another AI doomsday convert and proselytizer. I do believe that there is a global wave of mental disorder - in the West I mean. I also tend to believe that this mental imbalance affects enormously more people steeped in the academic world. This is just another example. People with a more grounded vision of the world just don’t fall for it so easily.

2 Likes
#3

AI is basically mental horsepower.
Don’t mean to disparage horses.
They’re intelligent & loving.
Not AI.
Nothing but brute data/computations
,
MACHINE personified!
An adding machine; blown-up by Godzilla puff-piece narratives.
A fable in the making.

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#4

Wouldn’t an A.I. take on the characteristic of it “Creator”???

3 Likes
#5

@Morrisville
How could it not in the times we live in? That’s intentional.

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#6

The programming of the programmer, what a vicious cycle


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#7

Yes.
Technocratic totalitarians

Rotten to their very cores


Ai mirrors their creators

After all; digital, is just a high-tech way of saying: extremely cheap copies.
Although; admittedly, like their creators - extremely deceptive.
Hence, no price discovery; meaning prices are becoming monopolized

beyond rehypothecation.

In other words, language too

suffers from the binary ways & means of “digital”.

2 Likes
#8

Thank you, Steve, for posting this. It was interesting to hear Dr. Hofstadter’s thinking on the AI question, and also what motivated him to write his intriguing book Godel-Escher-Bach.

Perhaps his take seems a bit depressing, as his thinking seems to be somewhat set in a materialistic paradigm. But, when one looks at human behaviour, and how people are tethered to their mobile contraptions, and can’t seem to carry on conversations without sticking one of their gizmo’s in your face, and saying “look at this” – well, one might appreciate his perspective.

And, we also know people who don’t use (mobile, handheld) contraptions, and their behaviour is very different, they seem more able to function in the real world without any dependency on the handheld gizmo for directions. Ditto for animals, who aren’t tethered – more authentic behaviours coming from them, connected to their internal senses. And these people (and the untethered animals) do give us hope in the spiritual part of life, so on that point – perhaps we’re a little more optimistic than he is.

I have a hard time imagining that this blooming AI period will last long, because it depends on material resources, and given the mining spree on earth, as if there’s no tomorrow, I wonder how long until the thing will wither, when the resource and energy extraction operations that feed this system start to implode and dwindle.

#9

@sunnyboy
I think in the back of ‘their’ (insert preferred globalist synonym here) mind, once everything has been discovered and harnessed, the culling of the herd can be finished. ‘They’ won’t need ‘us’ any longer. You’ve made some excellent points. :+1: