#artificial

No one yet knows what a man's province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial. ↗

— Agnes Smedley

#conceived #far #how #how far #knows

Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools. ↗

— Henri Bergson

#especially #faculty #intelligence #make #making

They convinced our mothers that if a food item came in a bottle -- or a can or a box or a cellophane bag -- then it was somehow better for you than when it came to you free of charge via Mother Nature....An entire generation of us were introduced in our very first week to the concept that phony was better than real, that something manufactured was better than something that was right there in the room. (Later in life, this explained the popularity of the fast food breakfast burrito, neocons, Kardashians, and why we think reading this book on a tiny screen with only three minutes of battery life left is enjoyable. ↗

— Michael Moore

#breastfeeding #fast-food #neocons #food

I named all my children after flowers. There's Lillie and Rose and my son, Artificial. ↗

— Bert Williams

#artificial #children #flowers #i #named

But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you? People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#artificial-intelligence #computers #personhood #technology #turing

The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble. ↗

— Henry Miller

#chop #even #give #him #his

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#after #artificial #away #bestowed #characters

The artificial is always innocent. ↗

— Frank O'Hara

#artificial #innocent

Baseball needs to put the steroids era behind it by having and enforcing tough rules against all kinds of artificial advantages, so that spring can return. ↗

— Marvin Olasky

#against #artificial #baseball #behind #enforcing

The quality of his being one with the people, of having no artificial or natural barriers between him and them, made it possible for him to be a leader without ever being or thinking of being a dictator. ↗

— Frances Perkins

#barriers #being #between #dictator #ever