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Kant posited a realm of noumena, or “things as they are understood by pure thought,” existing independent of experience or filtration through human concepts.
full picture of objective reality, if it were available, could come only by combining impressions of complementary aspects of a phenomenon and accounting for the distortions inherent in each.
Few have thoroughly understood what exactly has occurred through this digital revolution. Speed is partly to blame, as is inundation.
When information is contextualized, it becomes knowledge. When knowledge compels convictions, it becomes wisdom.
Today’s deep networks typically contain around ten layers.
AI cannot reflect upon what it discovers.
AI does not possess what we call common sense.
An AI is not sentient.
Like AI, AGI has no precise definition. However, it is generally understood to mean AI capable of completing any intellectual task humans are capable of—in contrast to today’s “narrow” AI, which is developed to complete a specific task.
Without significant fanfare—or even visibility—we are integrating nonhuman intelligence into the basic fabric of human activity. This is unfolding rapidly and in connection with a new type of entity we call “network platforms”:
These network platforms increasingly rely on AI, producing an intersection between humans and AI on a scale that suggests an event of civilizational significance.
Thus, although they are operated as commercial entities, some network platforms are becoming geopolitically significant actors by virtue of their scale, function, and influence.
We are experiencing and facilitating changes that require our attention—in thought, culture, politics, and commerce—well beyond the scope of a single human mind or particular product or service.
Network platforms are inherently large-scale phenomena. One of the defining characteristics of a network platform is that the more people it serves, the more useful and desirable it becomes to users.
In 2015, Google’s search team moved from using these human-developed algorithms to implementing machine learning.
The potential social, economic, political, and geopolitical influence of each major network platform (and its AI) is substantially augmented by its degree of positive network effects.
Thus, for each type of service, such as social media and video streaming, there are generally a small number of global network platforms, perhaps complemented by local ones. Their users benefit from, and contribute to, a new, as yet poorly understood phenomenon: the operation of nonhuman intelligence at global scale.
For all their benefits, the treaties (and the accompanying mechanisms of communication, enforcement, and verification) that came to define the nuclear age were not historical inevitabilities. They were the products of human agency and a mutual recognition of peril—and responsibility.
To the two traditional ways by which people have known the world, faith and reason, AI adds a third. This shift will test—and, in some instances, transform—our core assumptions about the world and our place in it.
adjust to a world in which our reason is not the only—and perhaps not the most informative—way of knowing or navigating reality.
Charting a human future turns on defining a human role in an AI age.
Societies need to be ready to supply the displaced not only with alternative sources of income but also with alternative sources of fulfillment.
Proteins are large, complex molecules that play a central role in the structure, function, and regulation of tissues, organs, and processes in biological systems. A protein is made up of hundreds (or thousands) of smaller units called amino acids, which are attached together to form long chains.
Much as technology accelerated the speed of information production and dissemination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in this era, information is being altered by the mapping of AI onto dissemination processes.
Traditional reason and faith will persist in the age of AI, but their nature and scope are bound to be profoundly affected by the introduction of a new, powerful, machine-operated form of logic.
democracy must retain human qualities. At the most basic level, this will mean protecting the integrity of democratic deliberations and elections.
MIT initiative to address the future of work,
social media, which diminishes the space for reflection, and online searching, which decreases the impetus for conceptualization.
As a consequence, the individual human’s role in reviewing, testing, and making sense of information diminishes. In its place, AI’s role expands.
one “meta” question looms: can the need for philosophy be met by humans assisted by AIs, which interpret and thus understand the world differently? Is our destiny one in which humans do not completely understand machines, but make peace with them and, in so doing, change the world?
