Artificial Flight Article on BoingBoing Friday, Feb 19 2010
AI 3:04 pm
Cory Doctorow linked the Aaron Diaz article yesterday, which is good for exposure. Doctorow said:
Dresden Codak’s “Artificial Flight and Other Myths (a reasoned examination of A.F. by top birds)” is a superb, spot-on critique of artificial intelligence skeptics (like, ahem, me), comparing the our arguments against the emergence of “real AI” to the arguments a bird might make against “real” artificial flight. I love being made to re-examine my own convictions while laughing my ass off.
The problem with the online hipster culture that Doctorow embodies is that its attention span is so unbelievably short that these sorts of short humorous pieces are the only way to get them to pay attention, ever. The idea of reading papers is absolutely foreign to this huge subculture, which powers Digg, Reddit, and practically every other social news site on the Internet. They are the mainstream media (MSM) of the Internet.
You know the motto of Improbable Research, “research that makes people laugh and then think”? I always think of this motto when I look at the mainstream Internet public, but with a different spin on it. Their motto should be, “make us laugh or we refuse to think”.
Fortunately, BoingBoing linked Futurismic for the news, which prominently mentions me in their article, so people can think about anthropomorphism in AI in more depth. Thanks, Paul Raven!
I read a couple of Doctorow’s books and came to the same conclusion about his “culture” (we are talking about the same person, right?)
It reminds me of when I was a teen in the 90′s and started to get into serous programming; seeking guidance and knowledge, I searched around for people with similar interests.
On one end there where people who called themselves “cyber-punks” and hung out in cafes talking about how to bring an end to Microsoft(from which I learned little); and on the other there was the minority of truly knowledgeable people who wanted little to do with the first group and their fads.
If you will excuse this observation; a lot of people talking about ‘AI’ and ‘life-extension’ and ‘nano-swarms’ seem to have more to do with the first group then the second (present company excluded, of course.)
No problems, Michael; been trying to balance my posts more thoroughly after you called me out on the IBM/cat brain piece. It’s more work (which means I post less), but more satisfying in the long run. Quality > quantity, I guess. :)