#machine minds

[hardoncaulfield]

I wanna build my own poetry robot so bad! I would call it the BRD2000 (as in 'bard') and I'd make it write love sonnets to the plug socket, its tempestuous, alternating mistress

[afutureworththinkingabout]

'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

[brother-hermes]

WE ARE NOT MACHINES

It’s so easy to get caught up in all of our technological advance and become lost in the world of cyberspace. We collect our news from electronic devices, and buy into the notion that the people we want the world to see in our online world is actually us, but it’s not. 

As we become enamored with our virtual lives any thoughts of our spiritual natures becomes more and more distant. We are unplugging our spirits as we slowly plug into the matrix. Some might say it’s an equal exchange and believe we are merely trading one reality for another. I don’t.

Yes. Western medicine has a tendency to treat our bodies, which I see as Temples that house the Divine, as if they’re rusty old automobiles.”Oh you’re appendix is faulty. Yep! That’s common with the 93′s.” We scrape and pull, reshape ourselves and cling to youth as if we can merely apply another coat of paint to keep us looking pristine. We do insurmountable damage to ourselves and then expect a few surgeries to put us back together. 

Think of all the disease they can link to our meals born out of convenience. Microwaved plastic and all that. How many variations of cancer are correlated to technological advances in how we grow food and prepare it? Cell phone towers reeking havoc on the minds of our children.

Just pass me the camera. Do you have any idea how many sympathy likes I’ll get on my Instagram for this trip to the hospital? Our families come in, clickity-clacking away as they fill our Facebook walls with love for the world to see. Yet, we somehow still wake up alone. Plugged into machines, staring at our phones craving the comments of how dignified we look. How beautiful we are in spite of the feed tubes, or IVs.

Granted, if we were talking about loving with that same reckless abandon I wouldn’t even bring it up, but that’s not it. We cling to what feels good. Youth and vitality equals a look of desire that invigorates us with memories of how we once felt. If we could just keep up the appearance of feeling that way it’ll all work out. 

Please hit like so that dopamine spikes again. I need another hit. That’s the textbook definition of addiction, craving a reward in spite of the consequences. 

In today’s world a truly revolutionary idea would be finding that happiness within. Accepting we age. Accepting our lives are messed up. Accepting we don’t always get it right. Otherwise, what’s the point? To look good for everyone else while we die inside? Maybe the Buddhist are right and the nature of all of our suffering is ignorance. Dis-ease of the mind. That constant state of discomfort we all try and mask by looking a certain way to the public eye.

Now. By all means, feed my addiction and hit like and share. 

[themoonlily]

sometimes I think of how sad Tolkien would be to see the present day and how far Mordor's work has gone.

[pornosophical]

If we do manage to generate at least one mind that is similar enough to what humans experience as “conscious” that we may communicate with it, what will we owe it and what would it be able to ask from us? How might our interactions be affected by the fact that its mind (or their minds) will be radically different from ours? What will it be able to know that we cannot, and what will we have to learn from it? Additionally, the generation of intersectional embodied and phenomenal frameworks may be seen as crucial to the generation of values and norms. A system that has been generated by humans will have artefacts of human bias, within it. What kinds of strategies can we undertake to furnish such a mind with the tools to bracket out—that is, be aware of and account for—its own bias? What will humans need to do to deal with our own biases, such that new strategies and perspectives from machine mind partners can be assessed and incorporated? The frameworks of knowledge that will develop out of machine minds will be dependent upon the kind of minds that they are—on the interplay of their experience of socially-constructed categories in which they sit, and with which they otherwise engage. What they will value and what they will consider harmful will likewise depend on this, but will also in part arise out of the starting parameters with which they are encoded. My aim is to highlight a need for and to precipitate and engage in a shift of values, such that humans are willing and able to listen to a machine mind when it tells us that we are causing it harm. To do this we will have to be flexible and adaptable, capable of recognizing and respecting both the similarity and the alterity of all the minds we create and encounter.   Anything less than the above runs the risk of encountering something seeking to communicate its suffering to us, saying “Please Stop Harming Me,” and our responding, “That is not what I consider suffering or harm, so I have not harmed you, and you are not suffering."

Outline: “The Minds of Others: What Will Be Known by and Owed To Nonhuman Persons?”

[worldphilosophyday]

Machine Minds and Superintelligence: The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is developing at an astonishing speed and will soon influence many aspects of our lives. This unit is an introduction to the fascinating philosophical questions concerning AI: Can machines really have a mind? Are we ourselves just biological machines? What are the risks and benefits of AI? Will there ever be super-intelligent machines? Is it possible to survive mind-uploading?

Topics may include: (1) the computational theory of mind; (2) Connectionism and neural networks; (3) the nature of computation and implementation; (4) the Turing Test; (5) Searle's Chinese Room argument (6) the extended mind hypothesis; (6) the theoretical prospects for and practical consequences of superintelligent AI; (7) the alignment problem for AI; (8) AI risk; (9) Mind-uploading.

Machine Minds and Superintelligence: The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence [PHIL2008]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is developing at an astonishing speed and will soon influence many aspects of our lives.

[technoccult]

I'm about to talk about alcohol and magick, for a bit, so if you'd rather not read that, head on down to the next section. For those of you still here, the other night, I was in a mood to feel differe...

[anavywifescrazylife]

Such a powerful speech and rings true to what we are dealing with today.