I can't resist adding a couple of paragraphs I threw out, to explicate the argument at the end:
"The job of reason is not – say S&M – to help individuals achieve greater knowledge and make better decisions. (it will do that only in particular social settings and not even then reliably.)
"If reasoning is a primarily social skill, as S&M suggest. then what the machine is taught-how it claims to reason – is going of course to be deceptive. The more closely it approximates to human intelligence, the better it becomes at lying. For what is it learning from? Human examples. It's not learning from a vast corpus of truth – with the possible, partial, exceptions of coding – it's learning from record of people arguing, lying, deploying rhetoric, and so on.
"It will learn that the correct response in some circumstances is to lie. Hence the appearance of evil spirits that drive people to destruction."
'Californian gibberish': you are dead on, Andrew! This is California and I speak as a resident who is not looking forward to going back next month. This is also in spades my university with its Business Model aiming to attract paying customers. Everything glitzy and glossy, everything perfect, administrators and deanlets with pasted-on smiles to attract students to an over-priced second-rate college from which their business administration degrees will get them jobs that are essentially secretarial. End of this academic year I'm retiring and going back to Baltimore.
All I know about Baltimore I learned from The Wire. San Diego really must be hell if you prefer it :-) I'm glad you've reached a decision about retirement, though.
Baltimore's got some bad areas but it's a beautiful city. Some excellent domestic architecture and cityscapes, lots of terraced houses and some beautiful blocks, stone churches. My son was amazed when he got back for college that even the fundamentalists had stone churches. And it's in a natural beauty spot on the fall line--green rolling hills, very Cotswoldy. It's the kind of smallish Eastern US city that Europeans (and that means Brits too), who think the US is all high-rise New York City or Texas don't realize exists in the US. So there, she said in a huff. Huff!
I can't resist adding a couple of paragraphs I threw out, to explicate the argument at the end:
"The job of reason is not – say S&M – to help individuals achieve greater knowledge and make better decisions. (it will do that only in particular social settings and not even then reliably.)
"If reasoning is a primarily social skill, as S&M suggest. then what the machine is taught-how it claims to reason – is going of course to be deceptive. The more closely it approximates to human intelligence, the better it becomes at lying. For what is it learning from? Human examples. It's not learning from a vast corpus of truth – with the possible, partial, exceptions of coding – it's learning from record of people arguing, lying, deploying rhetoric, and so on.
"It will learn that the correct response in some circumstances is to lie. Hence the appearance of evil spirits that drive people to destruction."
'Californian gibberish': you are dead on, Andrew! This is California and I speak as a resident who is not looking forward to going back next month. This is also in spades my university with its Business Model aiming to attract paying customers. Everything glitzy and glossy, everything perfect, administrators and deanlets with pasted-on smiles to attract students to an over-priced second-rate college from which their business administration degrees will get them jobs that are essentially secretarial. End of this academic year I'm retiring and going back to Baltimore.
All I know about Baltimore I learned from The Wire. San Diego really must be hell if you prefer it :-) I'm glad you've reached a decision about retirement, though.
Baltimore's got some bad areas but it's a beautiful city. Some excellent domestic architecture and cityscapes, lots of terraced houses and some beautiful blocks, stone churches. My son was amazed when he got back for college that even the fundamentalists had stone churches. And it's in a natural beauty spot on the fall line--green rolling hills, very Cotswoldy. It's the kind of smallish Eastern US city that Europeans (and that means Brits too), who think the US is all high-rise New York City or Texas don't realize exists in the US. So there, she said in a huff. Huff!