Discover Top Posts Tagged with #distributed networked intelligence

'Star Trek: Picard' and The Admonition: Misapprehensions Through Time

I recently watched all of Star Trek: Picard, and while I was definitely on board with the vast majority of it, and extremely pleased with certain elements of it, some things kind of bothered me. And so, as with much of the pop culture I love, I want to spend some time with the more critical perspective, in hopes that it’ll be taken as an opportunity to make it even better.

[Promotional image for Star Trek: Picard, featuring all of the series main cast.] This will be filled with spoilers, so. Heads up.

Read the rest of 'Star Trek: Picard' and The Admonition: Misapprehensions Through Time at A Future Worth Thinking About

Pieces on Machine Consciousness

by Damien

Late last month, I was at Theorizing the Web, in NYC, to moderate Panel B3, “Bot Phenomenology,” in which I was very grateful to moderate a panel of people I was very lucky to be able to bring together. Johnathan Flowers, Emma Stamm, and Robin Zebrowski were my interlocutors in a discussion about the potential nature of nonbiological phenomenology. Machine consciousness. What robots might feel.

I led them through with questions like “What do you take phenomenology to mean?” and “what do you think of the possibility of a machine having a phenomenology of its own?” We discussed different definitions of “language” and “communication” and “body,” and unfortunately didn’t have a conversation about how certain definitions of those terms mean that what would be considered language between cats would be a cat communicating via signalling to humans.

It was a really great conversation and the Live Stream video for this is here, and linked below (for now, but it may go away at some point, to be replaced by a static youtube link; when I know that that’s happened, I will update links and embeds, here).

Read the rest of Nonhuman and Nonbiological Phenomenology at A Future Worth Thinking About

Additionally, I have another quote about the philosophical and sociopolitical implications of machine intelligence in this extremely well-written piece by K.G. Orphanides at WIRED UK. From the Article:

Williams, a specialist in the ethics and philosophy of nonhuman consciousness, argues that such systems need to be built differently to avoid a a corporate race for the best threat analysis and response algorithms which [will be] likely to [see the world as] a “zero-sum game” where only one side wins. “This is not a perspective suited to devise, for instance, a thriving flourishing life for everything on this planet, or a minimisation of violence and warfare,” he adds.

Much more about this, from many others, at the link.

Until Next Time.

Pieces on Machine Consciousness originally posted at Technoccult

My Appearance on The Machine Ethics Podcast's A.I. Retreat Episode

As you already know, we went to the second Juvet A.I. Retreat, back in September. If you want to hear several of us talk about what we got up to at the then you're in luck because here are several conversations conducted by Ben Byford of the Machine Ethics Podcast.

I am deeply grateful to Ben Byford for asking me to sit down and talk about this with him. I talk a great deal, and am surprisingly able to (cogently?) get on almost all of my bullshit—technology and magic and the occult, nonhuman personhood, the sham of gender and race and other social constructions of expected lived categories, the invisible architecture of bias, neurodiversity, and philosophy of mind—in a rather short window of time.

So that's definitely something…

Read the rest of My Appearance on The Machine Ethics Podcast's A.I. Retreat Episode at A Future Worth Thinking About

Nonhuman and Nonbiological Phenomenology

Late last month, I was at Theorizing the Web, in NYC, to moderate Panel B3, "Bot Phenomenology," in which I was very grateful to moderate a panel of people I was very lucky to be able to bring together. Johnathan Flowers, Emma Stamm, and Robin Zebrowski were my interlocutors in a discussion about the potential nature of nonbiological phenomenology. Machine consciousness. What robots might feel.

I led them through with questions like "What do you take phenomenology to mean?" and "what do you think of the possibility of a machine having a phenomenology of its own?" We discussed different definitions of "language" and "communication" and "body," and unfortunately didn't have a conversation about how certain definitions of those terms mean that what would be considered language between cats would be a cat communicating via signalling to humans.

It was a really great conversation and the Live Stream video for this is here, and linked below (for now, but it may go away at some point, to be replaced by a static youtube link; when I know that that's happened, I will update links and embeds, here).

Read the rest of Nonhuman and Nonbiological Phenomenology at A Future Worth Thinking About