Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

From the middle of "Artifice and Intelligence" by Emily Tucker (Executive Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law), 2022-03-17:

While there is no indication that we are close to realizing Turing's narrower prediction of a computer that human beings reliably mistake for a human being, I am concerned that Turing's larger prediction has nevertheless been fulfilled. It is now quite usual, across all of journalism as well as popular and scholarly literature, to read of machines not only "thinking" but engaging in a wide range of contemplative and deliberative activities, such as "judging," "predicting," "interpreting," "deciding," "recognizing," and of course "learning." The terms "artificial intelligence," "AI" and "machine learning," placehold everywhere for the scrupulous descriptions that would make the technologies they refer to transparent for the average person.

Our lack of self-consciousness in using, or consuming, language that takes machine intelligence for granted is not something that we have co-evolved in response to actual advances in computational sophistication of the kind that Turing, and others, anticipated. Rather it is something to which we have been compelled in large part through the marketing campaigns, and market control, of tech companies selling computing products whose novelty lies not in any kind of scientific discovery, but in the application of turbocharged processing power to the massive datasets that a yawning governance vacuum has allowed corporations to generate and/or extract. This is the kind of technology now sold under the umbrella term "artificial intelligence."

[...]

Corporations have essentially colonized the imaginative space that Turing's paper asked us to explore. Instead of pursuing the limits of computers' potential for simulated humanity, the hawkers of "AI" are pursuing the limits of human beings' potential to be reduced to their calculability.

[Chag sameach to everyone celebrating Lag Ba'Omer tonight/tomorrow!]