Yes, fearless reader, you are already familiar with my observation that human understanding ended with the bomb. We were so very impressed with ourselves, its seeming that we had finally cracked the code of reality. How Tellering! Blowing it is the best that we can do?!?
Well, of course we are always after that. Blowing the code. And after that we haven't gotten very much further. Our attempts are language-bound. Our attempts are for and by the language-bound. That's what it means to be a philosopher or a scientist. We're still going after particles and forces. Truth in words and numbers. There is no Truth, dumbass; there's only trueing.
Now AI, so-called, has liberated us from language in the way that only computers can accomplish. There are many things we cannot know or prove, but we can watch the computer work it out. There are whole branches of math which are experimental. Beyond proof.
So we don't have to understand the workings of language either. We just watch it happen and prove our own fumbling inadequacy. I guess.
People worry that students will cheat, and David Brooks urges us, wisely it would seem, to hew more toward what is uniquely human.
Now it might seem that this is what I would urge as well. But, truth be told, his selections about what is the human quintessence leaves me as cold as did that AI art champion he uses as his foil. He remains embedded in capitalism, and I don't think he can understand what I even mean by the term.
The Turing test is all about language; about faking normal. Math being now the universal language of mankind, should we really be surprised when computing machines can fake language so well?
I tend on the side of those not so worried about teachers not being able to tell human from machine writing. Cheating in school is, after all, just a way to catch up to those privileged by the language in their home. Which moves a little bit closer to what I mean by "capitalism." It's what rich people do to get into the Ivy League.
Sure, I get mildly excited that we might have actual Internet search now, which might even bring Alphabet (a rose by any other name? "Google" is far too mathy) down. That would be really exciting, since auctioning keyterms can't work if we get to use natural language to find what we want. Take me Home (c) Scotty (tm), I mean Siri uh Alexa um!
The main processes of capitalism involve mystifying, then reifying and ultimately worshipping the selfie self. Individuation is what is threatened by AI. I want to rejoice. Mother, may I?
Well, language is what makes us social, like E.O. Wilson's ants. It should anti-individuate. On top of that, capitalism divides us by our want for recognition. And yet methinks, language, capitalism, individuation, and even Jesus and Math are all natural phenomena.
Which should mean that Earth prevails in the end. Intelligence was both never and always artificial. It's our language that collapses. Godel Escher Bosch!
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