Alva Noe: Don't Worry About the Singularity, We Can't Even Copy an Amoeba

An anonymous reader writes "Writer and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley Alva Noe isn't worried that we will soon be under the rule of shiny metal overlords. He says that currently we can't produce "machines that exhibit the agency and awareness of an amoeba." He writes at NPR: "One reason I'm not worried about the possibility that we will soon make machines that are smarter than us, is that we haven't managed to make machines until now that are smart at all. Artificial intelligence isn't synthetic intelligence: It's pseudo-intelligence. This really ought to be obvious. Clocks may keep time, but they don't know what time it is. And strictly speaking, it is we who use them to tell time. But the same is true of Watson, the IBM supercomputer that supposedly played Jeopardy! and dominated the human competition. Watson answered no questions. It participated in no competition. It didn't do anything. All the doing was on our side. We played Jeopordy! with Watson. We used 'it' the way we use clocks.""

Comments

writer doesn't get jeopardy, or much of anything,

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course Watson didn't answer questions in Jeopardy. That's not how Jeopardy is played. The contestant ASKS questions, not answers them.

Re:writer doesn't get jeopardy, or much of anythin

[donscarletti]

Terminator isn't a peer-reviewed scientific paper. In fact, it's often thought that much of its sources were fabricated with special effects and clever camera work.

In fact, it's author James Cameron is not even an established scientist, it has been recently discovered that his oceanographic work on Titanic was published BEFORE he underwent any deep sea exploration, and it's speculated that he only went down there afterwards to further fabricate his already published results. It's also speculated that he never produced unobtainium in his lab before claiming its discovery.

In fact, I'm not even sure if Judgement Day even happened, and whether or not any Cyberdyne Systems products were responsible for it happening.

Re:writer doesn't get jeopardy, or much of anythin

[PopeRatzo]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm living in a computer simulation being run on a computer. And I'm starting to get the feeling that it's a poorly optimized console port from Ubisoft.