#artificial

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

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

To what purpose is it to be artificially happy on the surface? ↗

— Anne Parillaud

#happy #purpose #surface

Control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress ↗

— Steve Grand

#control #cybernetics #intelligence

Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#intelligence

Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect. ↗

— Arthur C. Clarke

#computers #diversity #robots #intelligence

Yet humanity could not conceive. It tried and tried, and called mighty wizards from every corner of its earthly kingdom, but no child came. Many mourned, and said that a child was a terrible idea to begin with, ... ↗

— Catherynne M. Valente

#intelligence

You realize, there is no free-will in anything we create with Artificial Intelligence... ↗

— Clyde Dsouza

#memories-with-maya #singularity #transhumanism #intelligence