#artificialintelligence
#artificialintelligence
Originally shared by michael barth
In an extensive Guardian article, the author Oliver Burkeman wrote how Chalmers and others put forth a notion that all things in the universe might be (or potentially be) conscious, “providing the information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and organized.” So could an iPhone or a thermostat be conscious? And, if so, could we in the midst of a ‘Conscious Web’?
Back in the mid-1990s, the author Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg wrote an influential piece for Wired, A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain. In it she described the work of a little known Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, who 50 years earlier described a global sphere of thought, the “living unity of a single tissue” containing our collective thoughts, experiences and consciousness.
Teilhard called it the “nooshphere” (noo is Greek for mind). He saw it as the evolutionary step beyond our geosphere (physical world) and biosphere (biological world). The informational wiring of a being, whether it is made up of neurons or electronics, gives birth to consciousness. As the diversification of nervous connections increase, de Chardin argued, evolution is led towards greater consciousness. Or as John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist, cyber advocate and Teilhard de Chardin fan said: “With cyberspace, we are, in effect, hard-wiring the collective consciousness.”
So, perhaps we shouldn’t be so alarmed. Maybe we are on the cusp of a breakthrough not just in the field of artificial intelligence and the emerging internet of things, but also in our understanding of consciousness itself. If we can resolve the privacy, security and trust issues that both AI and the IoT present, we might make an evolutionary leap of historic proportions. And it’s just possible Teilhard’s remarkable vision of an interconnected “thinking layer” is what the web has been all along.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/20/internet-of-things-artificially-intelligent-stephen-hawking-spike-jonze
Originally shared by michael barth
In an extensive Guardian article, the author Oliver Burkeman wrote how Chalmers and others put forth a notion that all things in the universe might be (or potentially be) conscious, “providing the information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and organized.” So could an iPhone or a thermostat be conscious? And, if so, could we in the midst of a ‘Conscious Web’?
Back in the mid-1990s, the author Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg wrote an influential piece for Wired, A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain. In it she described the work of a little known Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, who 50 years earlier described a global sphere of thought, the “living unity of a single tissue” containing our collective thoughts, experiences and consciousness.
Teilhard called it the “nooshphere” (noo is Greek for mind). He saw it as the evolutionary step beyond our geosphere (physical world) and biosphere (biological world). The informational wiring of a being, whether it is made up of neurons or electronics, gives birth to consciousness. As the diversification of nervous connections increase, de Chardin argued, evolution is led towards greater consciousness. Or as John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist, cyber advocate and Teilhard de Chardin fan said: “With cyberspace, we are, in effect, hard-wiring the collective consciousness.”
So, perhaps we shouldn’t be so alarmed. Maybe we are on the cusp of a breakthrough not just in the field of artificial intelligence and the emerging internet of things, but also in our understanding of consciousness itself. If we can resolve the privacy, security and trust issues that both AI and the IoT present, we might make an evolutionary leap of historic proportions. And it’s just possible Teilhard’s remarkable vision of an interconnected “thinking layer” is what the web has been all along.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/20/internet-of-things-artificially-intelligent-stephen-hawking-spike-jonze
You might find the Invisibilia podcast on computers interesting. "Are computers changing human character?"
ReplyDeletehttp://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/