#artificial

He said he didn’t think Lenore should go to the G.O.D. "Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that," he said, "People don’t go to a place like that to look for other people. That’s the opposite of the whole concept that’s behind the thing. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#desert #religion #religion

I have been an "Official" all my life, without the least turn for it. I never could attain a true official manner, which is highly artificial and handles trifles with ludicrously disproportionate gravity. ↗

— William Allingham

#attain #been #could #disproportionate #gravity

I don't like LA. The majority just seem to be so artificial. Look at how they worship everything they think is fashionable. Isn't it sick? ↗

— Billie Joe Armstrong

#everything #fashionable #how #i #just

The planned sit-down reception is an artificial forum where one is presented with a limited number of persons with whom he can hold a conversation. ↗

— Jerzy Kosinski

#conversation #forum #hold #limited #limited number

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

Prayer… panacea for some, placebo to others. I thought of it as an epidural administered through the soul to anesthetize the mind. ↗

— Clyde Dsouza

#atheism #augmented-reality #inspirational-life #posthumanism #transcendentalism

But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially. ↗

— Jacques Lacan

#arrangement #artificially #broken #could #emphasis

French design hardly exists, except as artificial modernism. ↗

— Christian Lacroix

#design #except #exists #french #hardly

Mr. DeMille's theory of sexual difference was that marriage is an artificial state for women. The want to be taken, ruled, raped. That was his theory. ↗

— Hedy Lamarr

#demille #difference #his #marriage #mr