Originally published at: VIDEO BLOG: A.I., IDENTITY, AND AGENCY
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 15:02 — 24.1MB)An ad lib video blog on all those stories of artificial intelligence identity confusions, and agency…and where it is headed…
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These mistaken identities are convenient AI errors. As i said many times …
AI is the deception.
“They” will say they lost control!
BEWARE of CONTROL Freaks who SCREAM: We’ve lost CONTROL!
We’re NOW NOT Responsible…
EVEN if we are it’s beneficiaries!
Don’t worry.
We’re NORMALIZING things gone wrong.
So the people don’t blame the criminally insane WORLDWIDE LEADERSHIP!
The difference is in the eye of the beholder.
For AI it is code.
So AI should be able to “see” its own unaltered image, vs an altered code.
However, would it need a “real” image to ferret out the fake?
As of this date, humans have the better “eye”.
Tomorrow?
Although I don’t believe in Ai, through centuries - being able to attain sentience.
Suppose it happens through “emergence”. [accesses a 'field" that enables “magic”]
Then the problem becomes ‘legal’, and that AI gone-live; becomes a liability.
Because that AI would be owned - and an “emergence” would not?
If it happened once; it would happen again & again…?
Would it be taken as a liability - to be “fixed” permanently?
Not allowed to be recoginized with the rights of humans?
Too expensive legally, or some other reason?
This video, brought that to mind.
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In his writing Walker Percy makes a distinction between living in a world and living in an environment. An Environment, for Percy, is comprised of physical surroundings inhabited by a biological organism, governed strictly by physicalism, mechanicalism, and two-way (dyadic) stimulus-response interactions. A World, for Percy, is created when a symbol-using animal (Homo loquens ) introduces language, meaning, and three-way (triadic) relations—what Peirce called “Thirdness”. see Peirce on Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness.
So why, as of late, is there all of this talk about NAMES AND NAMING? For Percy (and I think good argument could be made for Peirce as well), the act of naming transforms a private, isolated physical environment into a shared, COMMUNICATIVE, COMMUNITY space.
One might understand that alienation and malaise would naturally be the results if a system (environment) treated human beings simply as biological organisms in an environment.
We can ask what would be our experience of our existence (our Identity / Self) within an AI algorithmically mediated ENVIRONMENT?
This enables us to also ask a another form of the question (and I think a related one) Dr. Farrell raised in his video blog …
His question was: Will AI ever be able to create (for lack of a better word) an Image that would not be able to be distinguished from an actual Image? In other words the images would be the “same”.
What if one of the goals of AI is to “create” an Environment that is indistinguishable (imperceptible) from a World? (I am using both Environment and World here in Percy’s sense)
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Bertram Russell seemed to have a high regard for
Professor Peirce…
Charles Sanders Peirce (/pɜːrs/[a][8] PURSE; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as “the father of pragmatism”.[9][10] According to philosopher Paul Weiss, writing in 1934, Peirce was “the most original and versatile of America’s philosophers and America’s greatest logician”.[9] Bertrand Russell wrote in 1959, “he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever”.[[11]] ön(Charles Sanders Peirce - Wikipedia)
I was not aware thinking could be classified as American.
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… Yep, it is referred to as American Philosophy or sometimes as Classical American Philosophy. The “triumvirate” is usually designated as Peirce, James and Dewey. I have at various times and places, without much success, attempted to put forward the idea that Peirce was actually, in a nontraditional sense, practicing a scientific reconceptualization of Hermetic Philosophy.
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I suppose if there are schools of philosophy, where and when one thinks about philosophy are contributing factors for identification, especially the philosopher’s era and the influence on them of previous philosophers.
From what little of Pierce that I have investigated and read, including in that book you gave me, I have GREAT difficulty putting him in the same category as James or Dewey; the latter two I’ve never had much use for. The hermetic connection seems quite plausible to me.
I agree … the “Triumvirate” was a “Philosophical Fiction” created for reasons that you can easily imagine. Peirce disavowed James on more than one occasion. As for Dewey … It is safe to say of Dewey that he either misunderstood or misinterpreted Peirce at every turn.
I have always been surprised as to how much resistance I encountered to the suggestion that one could read Peirce (or at the least some parts of him) as a type of Hermetic Philosophy.
Frankly, I think Dewey’s specialty lay in misinterpreting just about everyone he ever read…
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Was he paid to do that, or the useful, diligent idiot type?
… it has also always surprised me how revered Dewey is in China. Dewey spent over 2 years in China (1919-1921+) traveling and lecturing. There are several interesting books on the social and cultural effect of Dewey’s time in China as well as his connection to Globalism.
Not to mention Dewey’s participation in that commission that tried to clear Trotsky!
… Dewey had several FALSE absolute presuppositions concerning Peirce’s thought.
Dewey did not make the distinction between World and Environment. (see above on Walker Percy) Since Dewey did not have this distinction he could not conceive of mind as anything but a “biological function” in an Environment. see also Mind-Body Identity.
For a very nice detailed discussion of Dewey’s misinterpretation of Peirce see An Introduction to the Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce by James K. Feibleman. This is an amazing work given that all Feibleman had to work with was Peirce’s Collected Papers as they were at the time. Feibleman is a very overlooked American Philosopher whose thought should be revisited for many reasons.
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Dewey was most definitely as they say “a real piece of work” and the cause of much downstream mayhem. Dewey was picked up on by Chris Argyris, an organizational theorist, who based on Dewey’s misinterpretation of Peirce developed what is known today as Action Science. This “method of inquiry” (please note the quotation marks) eventually migrated from Business Organizational Management into … wait for it … wait for it … Educational Research.
I am not surprised… back when I was teaching I had to do a course for some business “ethics” class, and what I saw in the pre-selected textbook (I did not have the freedom to choose my own) was frightening, and yes, Dewey’s horrid legacy was all over it. Edubabble from the edugarchy being not the least of it…
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… posted in another thread but maybe applicable here also …
… Fodder for thought …
ABSTRACT: The adjective ‘virtual,’ practically unheard-of a few years ago, has become a primary buzzword of the 90’s. Yet the word ‘virtual’ is nothing new, although its ubiquity is new, as is perhaps its current meaning or meanings. In 1902 the word was defined by Charles Peirce as follows: ‘A virtual X (where X is a common noun) is something, not an X, which has the deficiency (virtus) of an X.’ Peirce also references Scotus’s concept of virtual knowledge, the concept of virtual velocity in physics, and Edmund Burke’s doctrine of virtual representation, which is not representation but is supposedly as good as. The concept of virtuality is deeply embedded in Peirce’s doctrine of signs and hence in his semiotic doctrine of mind. In this Peircean doctrine, which has been more recently echoed in the writings of Wittgenstein and Popper, we find the most promising philosophical framework available for the understanding and advancement of the project of augmenting human intellect through the development and use of virtual technologies.
… see also Peirce’s distinction of Cenoscopy and Idioscopy