“It makes me sad to think about a young person who might never cultivate the process of self-discovery that takes place in writing, which is inseparable from thinking.”
I was the editor lucky enough to have worked with this brilliant writer on her first two books. Her new one just blows me away, a a spiritual classic in the making. Attention must be paid!
One of the undersung privileges of being a book editor is the opportunity it offers to learn important things from one's authors. I experienced this to the fullest extent in working with Meghan O'Gieblyn.
An interesting conversation to say the least. I think AI is frightening because it can be so dehumanizing to the image of the human subject but not positively vice versa, precisely because it is a dead-eyed unconscious (i.e. "tam inscius quam machina").
Some of it is so beautifully bad that it teaches what NOT to do. I was lucky enough to find Downwind From Nobody by Joan Wells, gone to Heaven now but what a beautiful soul. She would have been a major poet, but went to collitch and learned to write fluent blithering, page-filling sloppy Academotherfesespeak. God, I wish I had met her before that ...
Writing, which is inseparable from thinking, I’ve believed that for years without having the exact words for it. That’s close to why I still write mostly by hand first. Great piece 🙏
GHAM has been on my list for too long, and coming here to read this interview after writing all night feels like a nudge from the starry Librarian to read it at once. AI and data centers combined with the world situation and our exposed power grid may be a self-solving problem. Literacy, however, will be a survival skill in days to come, before and after the Fall of Fones.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher-order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of sophisticated language (especially math and logic). A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
God, Human, Animal, Machine is such a good book. Essential reading for anyone thinking about AI these days (which is to say, everyone).
I was the editor lucky enough to have worked with this brilliant writer on her first two books. Her new one just blows me away, a a spiritual classic in the making. Attention must be paid!
One of the undersung privileges of being a book editor is the opportunity it offers to learn important things from one's authors. I experienced this to the fullest extent in working with Meghan O'Gieblyn.
An interesting conversation to say the least. I think AI is frightening because it can be so dehumanizing to the image of the human subject but not positively vice versa, precisely because it is a dead-eyed unconscious (i.e. "tam inscius quam machina").
I’m against slop as well. But could we stop pretending it’s all AI generated; there’s plenty of human author slop.
Some of it is so beautifully bad that it teaches what NOT to do. I was lucky enough to find Downwind From Nobody by Joan Wells, gone to Heaven now but what a beautiful soul. She would have been a major poet, but went to collitch and learned to write fluent blithering, page-filling sloppy Academotherfesespeak. God, I wish I had met her before that ...
Writing, which is inseparable from thinking, I’ve believed that for years without having the exact words for it. That’s close to why I still write mostly by hand first. Great piece 🙏
GHAM has been on my list for too long, and coming here to read this interview after writing all night feels like a nudge from the starry Librarian to read it at once. AI and data centers combined with the world situation and our exposed power grid may be a self-solving problem. Literacy, however, will be a survival skill in days to come, before and after the Fall of Fones.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher-order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of sophisticated language (especially math and logic). A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
Hello Megan, thank you for your thought-provoking stance on AI. What is it in John Calvin that was and is so disagreable for you ?
If you don't get an answer here, read her book God, Human, Animal, Machine and you'll see. A terrific book.