Another hardhitting analysis. I think Floridi’s “enveloping,” as you’ve adopted it, gives me another large chunk on the pie graph that I’ll call “The Real Threat Here”. Human problems will be increasingly reinterpreted in ways that make them solvable by digital means. And eventually those problems that resist such reinterpretation will be recast as THE problems, as in: “Why are you causing trouble in our Utopia?”
This is the one compelling threat I see in AI aside from the one I’ve so far preferred to focus on: the ersatz pseudo-human, AI as lover/companion. Very soon people will be interacting with bots that are more understanding, funnier, *sexier* than the people around them.
There are also the threats that most people focus on, as per ‘90s sci fi, and some are viable. Certainly AI-based mass social surveillance/control is right around the corner. And AI weaponry. But these are *foreseen*. You focus here on what few people are thinking about.
In our western societies, this next enveloping, just as with the internet, will be a matter of boiling the frog. It will happen incrementally.
Humans can’t get rid of their impetus and internal urge to worship. In spite of this, at least since Darwin, the West has been trying to get rid of God.
The need to worship vs. the elimination of the Divine: are today’s elites reconciling this divide via technology?
Creating supercomputers with internal processes that are (in some ways) beyond our comprehension, restores some species of awe and Mystery to us, yet at the same time supercomputers of themselves handily require no moral restraints of us. Further, since we humans originated these devices, we can worship ourselves for being the originators of these technological “gods”.
And of course, any who are planning to use supercomputers to enslave the rest of humanity definitely believe themselves to “be as gods”.
Before the fall, man was given a job, gardener or keeper. After the fall, man was not relieved of his job, but man found his job burdensome, sweat filled, etc. So history is filled with men who employ work-arounds, stealing the other guy's lunch, enslaving the other guy, and re engineering the other guy. Now, the 4th work-around is coming about by tasking the childless, drug-addled, debt slave with training his AI replacement. Inevitable?
Good News. Our redeemer was a laborer, who labored for his Father, a "general contractor". And if building isn't your thing, there is beauty and truth. Some of the most beautiful works are signed, Hand of a Sinner.
Become irreplaceable. Stay in friendship with your employer, and in wonderment, learn more and more and more, never to be "bored", never to be replaced.
Take care. Going out to stake the Narcissus so come summer and their dry down, they can be located, harvested, split, and "marketed".
Another hardhitting analysis. I think Floridi’s “enveloping,” as you’ve adopted it, gives me another large chunk on the pie graph that I’ll call “The Real Threat Here”. Human problems will be increasingly reinterpreted in ways that make them solvable by digital means. And eventually those problems that resist such reinterpretation will be recast as THE problems, as in: “Why are you causing trouble in our Utopia?”
This is the one compelling threat I see in AI aside from the one I’ve so far preferred to focus on: the ersatz pseudo-human, AI as lover/companion. Very soon people will be interacting with bots that are more understanding, funnier, *sexier* than the people around them.
There are also the threats that most people focus on, as per ‘90s sci fi, and some are viable. Certainly AI-based mass social surveillance/control is right around the corner. And AI weaponry. But these are *foreseen*. You focus here on what few people are thinking about.
In our western societies, this next enveloping, just as with the internet, will be a matter of boiling the frog. It will happen incrementally.
Humans can’t get rid of their impetus and internal urge to worship. In spite of this, at least since Darwin, the West has been trying to get rid of God.
The need to worship vs. the elimination of the Divine: are today’s elites reconciling this divide via technology?
Creating supercomputers with internal processes that are (in some ways) beyond our comprehension, restores some species of awe and Mystery to us, yet at the same time supercomputers of themselves handily require no moral restraints of us. Further, since we humans originated these devices, we can worship ourselves for being the originators of these technological “gods”.
And of course, any who are planning to use supercomputers to enslave the rest of humanity definitely believe themselves to “be as gods”.
Before the fall, man was given a job, gardener or keeper. After the fall, man was not relieved of his job, but man found his job burdensome, sweat filled, etc. So history is filled with men who employ work-arounds, stealing the other guy's lunch, enslaving the other guy, and re engineering the other guy. Now, the 4th work-around is coming about by tasking the childless, drug-addled, debt slave with training his AI replacement. Inevitable?
Good News. Our redeemer was a laborer, who labored for his Father, a "general contractor". And if building isn't your thing, there is beauty and truth. Some of the most beautiful works are signed, Hand of a Sinner.
Become irreplaceable. Stay in friendship with your employer, and in wonderment, learn more and more and more, never to be "bored", never to be replaced.
Take care. Going out to stake the Narcissus so come summer and their dry down, they can be located, harvested, split, and "marketed".