Newmedia on Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:58:27 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Essay-Grading Software |
Patrice: > Made me think of this very issue, where 'Hubos' > (Human robots) would presumably make 'automated > grading' even more efficient, and acceptable. Yes but this is based on another MISTAKE -- that "robots" are at all anything like *humans* (typical mistake #3). The "meme" that lingers after 50 years of *failure* by the Artificial Intelligence crowd (now represented by Ray Kurzweil and his clueless epigone at Google etc) is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about humans (typical mistake #1). As historian of technology George Dyson correctly insists, these machines are part of a *diffferent* UNIVERSE from both the humans and our other "non-digital" inventions (including society/culture). As he says in the preface to his 1997 "Darwin Among the Machines," "In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature and machines." He then updates this three-part distinction in his 2012 "Turings Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe," by distinguishing computers from other machines. If we can't adequately understand these distinctions, then we will have little chance of sorting any of this out! Machines will *never* become "conscious" or "emotional" or "spiritual" because none of that is "programmed" into them. They weren't "designed" to do any of this -- indeed, we couldn't include any of this precisely because these qualities cannot be reduced to something we can design (i.e. a result of typical mistake #1). Imagining that "robots" will become like humans, as the Swedes have in "Real Humans," is a typical device for science fiction that is designed to amuse humans . . . and of no "interest" to the machines themselves -- no matter how much processing power they might have. Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org