#computer

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

I've never had Internet access. Actually, I have looked at things on other people's computers as a bystander. A few times in my life I've opened email accounts, twice actually, but it's something I don't want in my life right now. ↗

— Jhumpa Lahiri

#accounts #actually #computers #email #few

Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#eventually #get #journalists #kill #middle-class

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer. ↗

— Robert Lanza

#any #automatically #brain #computer #consciousness

Computer photography won't be photography as we know it. I think photography will always be chemical. ↗

— Annie Leibovitz

#chemical #computer #i #i think #know

I get hired to hack into computers now and sometimes it's actually easier than it was years ago. ↗

— Kevin Mitnick

#ago #computers #easier #get #hack

I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface. ↗

— David Mamet

#altogether #appear #bad #bad thing #believed

No computer, no gadget, no trickery. I am an animal, it is a plant. I will beat the weed! ↗

— Matthew McConaughey

#animal #beat #computer #gadget #i

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time. ↗

— Thomas Nagel

#attempts #beings #believe #computers #conscious

We're entering a new world in which data may be more important than software. ↗

— Tim O'Reilly

#data #entering #important #may #more