Why Artificial Intelligence Often Feels Like Magic

we cannot control every outcome, but we can work to change our culture. Technological processes like artificial intelligence won’t build a better world by themselves, just as they tell us nothing useful about general intelligence. What they can do is to lay bare the real workings of the moral and more-than-human landscape we find ourselves in, and

... See more

It turns out that computers are particularly adept at the tasks that we humans find most difficult: crunching equations, solving logical propositions, and other modes of abstract thought. What artificial intelligence finds most difficult are the sensory perceptive tasks and motor skills that we perform unconsciously: walking, drinking from a cup, s

... See more

And yet the marketing, the libertarian politics, and the continued social acceptability of technologically driven industries like the one that has produced decision-guidance technology depends on the assumption that tech makes our lives better. That assumption drives the adoption of AI, as it drove the adoption of smartphones and the Internet befor

... See more

A subset of intense, Twitter-famous accelerationists really loves to play up the mystical unknowability of LLMs--the way we still can't quite reverse engineer how, e.g., GPT-4 arrives at its “answers.” You can see this as a kind of anti-modernist desire for re-enchantment, but it’s also a kind of capital-F Futurist Modernism--a total belief in powe... See more

“There’s this great essay by Hannah Baer in the latest issue of Artforum, where she unpacks why we are so afraid of AI becoming more intelligent than humans. If you look at this historically, humans have positioned themselves as the most intelligent species, even though that’s not true. As the “most intelligent species,” we’ve used this power as an

... See more