3rd
Update: Kevin Kelly responded here;)
I wanted to point you towards a most excellent piece/counterpoint to Kevin Kelly and Ray Kurzweil, whose own projections on this topic were top of mind at the Singularity Summit last weekend.
Nova’s take on the future of collective inteligence and the global brain posits that the meaningful and mutually beneficial cooperation between humans and machines will never go away (as opposed to a purely technological singularity), and that conciousness, and self, lies fundamentally/categorically outside of the realm of machines (a view also sympathetic to Nova’s own Buddhist leanings):
“So the question I have been asking myself lately is how connected is consciousness to the physical substrate? And furthermore, how important is consciousness to what we consider intelligence to be? If consciousness is important to intelligence, then artificial intelligence may not be achievable through software alone — it may require consciousness, which may in turn require a different kind of computing system, one which is more connected (through bidirectional feedback) to the physical quantum substrate of the universe.
What all this means to me is that human beings may form an important and potentially irreplaceable part of the OM — the One Machine — the emerging global superorganism. In particular today the humans are still the most intelligent parts. But in the future when machine intelligence may exceed human intelligence a billionfold, humans may still be the only or at least most conscious parts of the system. Because of the uniquely human capacity for consciousness (actually, animals and insects are conscious too), I think we have an important role to play in the emerging superorganism. We are it’s awareness. We are who watches, feels, and knows what it is thinking and doing ultimately.”
Definitely worth a read. This progression resonates with me particularly because it agrees with the views of my favorite (modern, analytic) philisopher, John MacDowell, who likes to say that the cooperation between “receptivity and spontanaeity” (read: mind and world) is not even notionally separable. Which is to say that it’s in the black box of cooperation between what McDowell calls “scheme and given” that emprical knowledge happens.
Say what?!
We can’t reverse engineer empirical knowledge (much less the self, or consciousness) even if we can in fact reverse engineer the brain (this is the goal of cognitive computing, and something I definitely support) because the information to do so isn’t fundamentally available to us (or machines for that matter). We literally can’t get at it — the cooperation literally isn’t even “notionally seprable” — that is, it is not even conceptually parsable.
So don’t worry, inteligent agents are not going to replace you…just yet;)
Disclosure: Twine is a client.
