Btw, I see John Searle has a review essay in the Oct 9 NY Review of Books occasioned in part by Bostrom's book (pay-walled link below):
The weird marriage of behaviorism—any system that behaves as if it had a mind really does have a mind—and dualism—the mind is not an ordinary part of the physical, biological world like digestion—has led to the confusions that badly need to be exposed.
No offense. Just suggesting that there's rich vein of comedy (and, well, who knows, maybe a career) in taking the propositions of a madman seriously, or at least at face value, all of which is afoot in the voice of Borges' deadpan narrator:
He did not want to compose another Quixote —which is easy— but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.
So, too, the presumption that "intelligence," like some res cogitans, might be abstracted from living persons (or text from a text), and so relieved of senses or genitalia ("artificial") would be not only indistinguishable from what passes for "intelligence" among human beings, but superior.
Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes’. The latter, in a clumsy fashion, opposes to the fictions of chivalry the tawdry provincial reality of his country; Menard selects as his “reality” the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega.
It's not an allegory. An analogy. But a familiar topos in the comédie humaine.
But I think you're on to something as the the wackiness emergent in the conjunction of "artificial" and "intelligence". Do you know Borges' story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"? Purportedly a review of a 20th-century, word-for-word recreation of Cervantes book.
Btw, I see John Searle has a review essay in the Oct 9 NY Review of Books occasioned in part by Bostrom's book (pay-walled link below):
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/09/what-your-computer-cant-know/?insrc=toc
No offense. Just suggesting that there's rich vein of comedy (and, well, who knows, maybe a career) in taking the propositions of a madman seriously, or at least at face value, all of which is afoot in the voice of Borges' deadpan narrator:
He did not want to compose another Quixote —which is easy— but the Quixote itself. Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.
So, too, the presumption that "intelligence," like some res cogitans, might be abstracted from living persons (or text from a text), and so relieved of senses or genitalia ("artificial") would be not only indistinguishable from what passes for "intelligence" among human beings, but superior.
Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes’. The latter, in a clumsy fashion, opposes to the fictions of chivalry the tawdry provincial reality of his country; Menard selects as his “reality” the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega.
It's not an allegory. An analogy. But a familiar topos in the comédie humaine.
AI: the Pygmalionism of computer scientists.
But I think you're on to something as the the wackiness emergent in the conjunction of "artificial" and "intelligence". Do you know Borges' story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"? Purportedly a review of a 20th-century, word-for-word recreation of Cervantes book.