Imagine we are a few decades from now.
"Make everyone happy" goes the instruction to the super intelligent machine. But how can meaning reside in a word like 'happy'.
The word 'happy' has us squelching in the vagaries of language for we are imprisoned by meaning. For many there is very meaningless of meaning. Our instruction 'make us happy' which we wish to convey may trip in a tangle of wires, for the super intelligent machine may see human kind
as being blissfully 'happy;' when they are all out of it on heroin drips.
.For there are distortions in language and there is a need to clarify, to elucidate concepts, to convey precision, determinacy, and literalness in order to improve our understanding. Most people have an ideal conception of language as utterly precise, determinate, literal and perfectly unequivocal and ambiguity is a challenge to this ideal theory of language. So we employ metaphor. For in metaphor we have the capacity to evince or arouse feelings, as distinct from conveying information. Or so we believe, for the dream of clarity by way of metaphor is an ideological dream.
An Oxford academic is warning that humanity runs the risk of creating super intelligent computers that harnessing such large amounts of computing power, and at speeds inconceivable to the human brain, that they will eventually create global networks with each other - communicating without human interference.eventually destroy us all, even when specifically instructed not to harm people.
"Make everyone happy" goes the instruction to the super intelligent machine. But how can meaning reside in a word like 'happy'.
The word 'happy' has us squelching in the vagaries of language for we are imprisoned by meaning. For many there is very meaningless of meaning. Our instruction 'make us happy' which we wish to convey may trip in a tangle of wires, for the super intelligent machine may see human kind
as being blissfully 'happy;' when they are all out of it on heroin drips.
.For there are distortions in language and there is a need to clarify, to elucidate concepts, to convey precision, determinacy, and literalness in order to improve our understanding. Most people have an ideal conception of language as utterly precise, determinate, literal and perfectly unequivocal and ambiguity is a challenge to this ideal theory of language. So we employ metaphor. For in metaphor we have the capacity to evince or arouse feelings, as distinct from conveying information. Or so we believe, for the dream of clarity by way of metaphor is an ideological dream.
An Oxford academic is warning that humanity runs the risk of creating super intelligent computers that harnessing such large amounts of computing power, and at speeds inconceivable to the human brain, that they will eventually create global networks with each other - communicating without human interference.eventually destroy us all, even when specifically instructed not to harm people.
Dr Stuart Armstrong, of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, has predicted a future where machines run by artificial intelligence become so indispensable in human lives they eventually make us redundant and take over.
According to David Pears, Wittgenstein's view is that "...the meanings of our words are not guaranteed by any independent pattern already existing in the world and waiting for language to be attached to it.
On the contrary, the pattern that we see depends on what we do with our words.
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