God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

If “intelligence” means abstract thought, then it would be foolish to think that plants are engaging in it. But if it means merely the ability to solve problems or adapt to a particular environment, then it’s difficult to say that plants are not capable of intelligence. If “consciousness” denotes self-awareness in the strongest sense of the word, t

Emergentists, in contrast, believe that complex, dynamic systems cannot always be explained in terms of their constituent parts. It’s not simply a matter of peering into the brain with MRIs and discovering a particular area or system that is responsible for consciousness. The mind is instead a kind of structural pattern that emerges from the comple

What companies like Google had discovered is that when you have data on this scale, you no longer need a theory at all. You can simply feed the numbers into algorithms and let them make predictions based on the patterns and relationships they notice.

It seems impossible. But then again, aren’t all creative undertakings rooted in processes that remain mysterious to the creator? Artists have long understood that making is an elusive endeavor, one that makes the artist porous to larger forces that seem to arise from outside herself.

As Stewart Brand, that great theologian of the information age, famously put it, “We are gods and might as well get good at it.”

A superintelligent system could have disastrous effects even if it had a neutral goal and lacked self-awareness. “We cannot blithely assume,” Bostrom wrote, “that a superintelligence will necessarily share any of the final values stereotypically associated with wisdom and intellectual development in humans—scientific curiosity, benevolent concern f

The more we try to rid the world of our image, the more we end up coloring it with human faults and fantasies. The more we insist on removing ourselves and our interests from the equation, the more we end up with omnipotent systems that are rife with human bias and prejudice.

Coincidences are in most cases a mental phenomenon: the patterns exist in the mind, not in the world.

like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.