17Oct
An article about consciousness, AI, and Bodies
When you 'think' what is happening in your head? There are hundreds of books that try to explain human consciousness (see below for some of my favourites) and there are literally dozens of books on the impact of 'artificial intelligence'. The breakthrough volume for me was discovered mooching up St Martins Lane (then full of great bookshops) in the 1990s - and I discovered The Age of Intelligent Machines by the American scientist and expert futurologist and tech-entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil - (was it at Zwemmers pr Better Books?) it was in full view in the window. I later discovered that Kurzweil was one of three futurists predicting what became known as the Technological Singularity - the point in time when we would create machines more intelligent than we are (think about this - and please don't use Donald Trump as an example). The other two futurist experts were the mathematician and sci-fi author Vernor Vinge and the Roboticist-philosopher Hans Moravec:
In the early 1990s, these three books were inspirational - and the first that I discovered that not only investigated Artificial Intelligence but also conjectured that it was inevitable that we would eventually produce a machine that could out-think us humans - I think it was Kurzweil who dubbed this The Singularity.
The Age of Intelligent Machines inspired what I realise now was a rest-of-my-life fascination with AI - and don't forget that it was the gay Englishman Alan Turing who had 'invented' this branch of study (it was called Machine-Learning' back then) in 1950 when he published his paper on the Turing Test:
"The Turing test, or "imitation game," is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit human-like intelligence. It involves a human judge who has text-based conversations with both a human and a machine, without knowing which is which. If the judge cannot reliably distinguish the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. It was proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 and is designed to bypass the complex question of whether machines can think by focusing on their ability to imitate human conversation."
(Google AI Summary)
And so it goes - I won't give you an account of my extended learning and thinking on AI - but just describe what your task is for West Wight CultureFest: I want you to develop/design/compose/ choreograph /illustrate/paint/write or otherwise celebrate the opportunity/threat of Artificial Intelligence. And I want you to think about a Mind without a Body - and if AI can ever operate at a superhuman level without the emotions, physical feelings, experiences and limitations of the human experience of having a body - think of what a body gives you - that feeling of athletic prowess, craft-capability, sexual pleasure - think of all the things that impinge on your thinking because you have body - emotions, physical feelings, walking through a city, walking through the countryside, dancing, making love, swimming, running, jumping, etc etc...and illustrate this in some performative way...
My favourite books on AI and Consciousness include:
Ray Kurzweil: The Age of Intelligent Machines 1990
Ray Kurzweil: : The Age of Spiritual Machines - When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
David Lodge: Consciousness and the Novel 2004
Lev Manovich: Software Takes Command 2013
Neil Gershenfeld: When Things Start to Think 1999
Luke Dormehl: Thinking Machines 2016
Michio Kaku The Future of the Mind 2014
lots more to come here...
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