Template:M intro technology rumours of our demise: Difference between revisions

We call it that because machines have proven consistently good at doing things humans are too weak, slow, inconstant or easily bored to be good at: ''mechanical'' things.  

Machines — ''quelle surprise'' — are ''good'' at mechanical things. But state-of-the-art machines, per Arthur C. Clarke, aren’t magic: it just ''seems'' like it, sometimes.  

But executing a task with strength, speed, consistency, fungibility and patience are lofty aims ''only if you haven’t got a suitable machine''. If you ''have'' got a machine, use it. Let your people do something more useful.  

We are used to using the “Turing machine” as a [[metaphor]] for “mind”: how about inverting that? How about using “body”, in that dishonourably dualist but yet intuitive [[Descartes|Cartesian]] sense — as a [[metaphor]] for a “Turing machine”  and “mind” for natural intelligence? Might “mind” and “body” in this sense be a practical guiding principle for the [[division of labour]] between human and machine?

What goes to “body”, give to a machine. Motor skills. Temperature regulation. The pulmonary system. Digestion. Aspiration. The conscious mind has no business here. There is little it can add. It only gets in the way. There is compelling evidence that when the conscious mind takes over motor skills, things quickly go to hell.<ref>This is the premise of Daniel Kahneman’s {{br|Thinking: Fast and Slow}}, and for that matter, [[Matthew Syed]]’s {{br|Bounce}}></ref>

But leave interpersonal relationships, communication, perception, [[construction]], decision-making in times of uncertainty, imagination and creation to the conscious mind. ''Leave the machines out of this''. They will only bugger it up. Let them ''report'', by all means. Let them assist: by all means, triage the “conscious act” to hive off mechanical tasks. Let the machines loose on them. Let them provide, on request, the information the conscious mind needs to make its build its models and make its plans, but ''do not let them intermediate that plan''.

The challenge is not to automate indiscriminately, but ''judiciously''. To ''optimise'', so the conscious mind is set free of tasks it is not good at, not diverted from its valuable work by formalistic requirements of the machine. This can’t really be done by rote.

The magic of sufficiently advanced technologies, like [[artificial intelligence]], induces us to look too far ahead.  

We see an AI art generator and immediately conclude that the highest order of human intellectual achievement is at stake. Not only does reducing art to “[[Bayesian prior]]s” stunningly [[Symbol processing|miss the point]] about art — in an artificially intelligent way, ironically — but it skips over all the easier, drearier, more machine-like applications to which machines might profitably put, but with which the poor inconstant human is still burdened. For these mundane but potentially life-changing tasks there is, apparently, no technological resolution in sight: machines that can fold washing, remember where you put the car keys, weed out fake news, and wipe down the kitchen table,wipe a baby’s arse.