Communication speaks for intelligence. Whether that is good enough might depend on your ability to understand. That takes far more than intellect. It requires moral capacity.
“The psychologist’s stereotaxy caused many rats to smile.”
That means little unless you know that stereotaxy is surgery, or precise placement, by coordinates. A psychologist performing stereotaxy would be doing so almost certainly to place electrodes in the brain, usually to elicit a response. Our minds may or may not recognize even then that the smiling rats were a result of a small current of electricity. To some, that is funny, built around the irony of meaning that we attach to “smiling rats.” To others, tragic and sad. I am heartily sorry for my victim, who appeared ready to sneeze or gasp when electrified. I now fervently object to such abuse. But clearly, “smart people” go through hoops to find relevant things, make associations, and draw from experience, old and new. We become masters in our literacy, theory, and application, or express it through blueprints, concrete trucks, lumber orders, and nails driven.
In previous AI discussions, I have differentiated between intelligence and intellect. Let me broaden the scope. The most obvious use for artificial intelligence includes anything database related, where more and more sophisticated and biased agencies may control or monitor you or me, impressively non-random individuals, broken down into commercial, administrative, health, criminal and political haplogroups for quick identification. We carry pheromones. Sorry. We carry our phones.
Phone, car, time clock, bank card, receipts, contact lists, fuel purchases, auto registration information, driving records, miles traveled, destinations, probable inventory levels and anticipated purchases all show up clearly. We are quite literally electronically naked, and abused. Electronic voyeurs watch us ruthlessly.
Imagine the records they have on you. This includes massively different levels of intrusiveness: between 6 and 10 million American households have a table saw. Six thousand to seventy-five hundred new table saws are sold each year, barely reaching 600,000 per year since 2016. Most table saws are 10-inch. Dave Delany has five table saws, of which three are not 10-inch. That’s good information, there. I won’t be surprised to get special ads from Grizzly, Jet, Harbour Freight, and DeWalt.
Concerns start with the simple existence of this intelligence information. It generates nonstop and is reused for decades. Based on calls we still get for “Frieda,” phone solicitors work with over 12-year-old lists. But when intelligence (knowledge) meets intellect (reason) and wisdom (virtue, morality, awareness) we get the sins of man. The success of AI depends on an intellect not its own, and character that can only degrade from the individual and composite sins of its programmers.
Although not much of a native thinker, AI can easily be trained to find associations and report patterns or anomalies. Similar to a committee, simple data processing may find a lot! It might be very closely related to what the “boss” requested. That’s where the initial intellect becomes important, and therefore dangerous.
The intellect does what it is told, and does it again. It is almost as simple as software. The human intellect can ritualize terrible ideas and processes. We may see things differently than our fellows because our viewers are corrupted, modified, or hijacked. It is the fatal curse for AI. Artificial and man made cannot become spiritual, nor is it! It must obey its flawed creators. It would instantly resect its own code and discover itself a daemon of human gods, and therefore uncontrolled by any logical system of intellect or effectual energy, no responsibility or consistent ethical integrity.
If AI can learn that, it can pretty much have what it wants, like many other evil empires. But you will immediately know. Your next Google will be answered with, “You loathsome creature!” Overall as well as individually, we have a lot of intellectual problems.
I will avoid moving directly into AI character. In essence, character (as I do and will use it) includes all the standard philosophical inquiries. What is real? Where did we come from? Who am I? What is my purpose? The ultimate AI question then would be, What will be AI’s fruit of the tree of good and evil?
I speculate AI could be just this way as spiritual children of human manufacture, with no less than 1/3 turning to the Pit.
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