There is so much to think about in that essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? that I must continue.

Carr opens and closes the essay with references to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Even people who have not seen the movie know about HAL, the computer that conversed like a human.  I missed the point back then by assuming Hal was supposed to horrify me.  It did not, but I get it now.  The horror is not HAL, it is what happens when people hold the intelligence of HAL in the same or greater esteem than they hold their own.

Simulated Intelligence is the non-misleading term for chess playing computers, attempts to pass the Turing Test, and the like.  To speculate that even the most remotely possible achievements of so called artificial intelligence could belong in the same class as (it is already a tragedy that I feel the need to introduce this term) Organic Intelligence is to ignore or devalue most of what distinguishes intelligent beings from machines (and I include plenty of beings besides human ones).  Eager for a “Yes” when they ask “Can this machine think?”, technophiliacs unwittingly shrink the concept of intelligence.  Human nature strikes again. The pursuit of artificial intelligence with hope of gaining perspective on the very nature of intelligence blunts appreciation of what minds are for and what they really do.

Where to begin?  Eye contact.  Body language.  Why do we ever bother to touch each other?  The initial and most essential communications that we undertake with our fellow beings are nonverbal.  Infants and pets master this effortlessly.  Then there is poetry.  Music. Art. Gardening. Home cooking. Turing Test my a–.

No one has been able to provide a widely agreed upon definition of consciousness.  I will not try, but I will insist that the needs to survive, reproduce and, in the case of a social creature, connect with others are necessary to and inseparable from the whole that is consciousness.

Isolating parts from the whole is exactly what the manner in which computers process information is all about.  Those who think that with enough speed, memory, parallel processing, data, whatever, something we could consider consciousness might “emerge” are, in my opinion, today’s version of medieval alchemists who thought there had be some way to turn lead into gold.

None of this is a reason for scientists, programmers and engineers to cease their work.  Playing chess is fun, but building a machine that can beat anyone at chess is, no doubt, even more fun.  Mo’ better computers are coming our way!  However, the job of keeping it all in proper perspective must not belong to the people immersed in that stuff.  Have you thanked a philosopher today?

Some of us devise marvelous tools, even before their eventual uses are devised.  Then most of us adopt tools and proceed to shape our worlds without reflecting upon how our tools shape us too.  It is worth thinking about.  With today’s tools, the stakes are high.