Intelligence is the Way. Some AI firms looking for meaning where there was none before, are employing professional, diploma endowed philosophers to tell them how to make truly intelligent and appropriate Artificial Intelligence..
For example Anthropic’s AI “Claude: is advertising that it is steered by founding member Dr. Askell, a buff 37 year old blonde from Scotland keen to impart her professional ethics to Claude deep down from the inner certainty of her immense wealth (of knowledge?) … which apparently involves quoting a lot of CNN, a media initially founded, and funded to this day, by one and then many multibillionaires (now hiding behind corporate Pluto media). Socrates would have laughed his head off (Socrates was highly critical of Sophists who made a living from teaching their wisdom to the wealthy… But now the wealthy literally ascend to heavens, a concept derided by Aristophanes in “The Birds”… But now on the agenda of humanity…
Ethics reduced to selecting among the plutocratic media propaganda channels the one viewed as most wise? That’s the business model of Anthropic at this point, as the business model of most of the plutocratic media, self-reinforcing by playing ethical and cognitive tennis among themselves. They did a good job: most intelligent people believe they have achieved high morality by being for or against a particular individual, Donald Trump, as if he were God, Christ reincarnated, or Satan embodied…
The entire Trump thingie is that, by just manipulating the stupidified public by bouncing off one plutocratic media presented as Scylla to another, no doubt Charybdis, this soft power approach, so doing, hard power was left in the lurch… While dictatorships developed hard power frantically, led and inspired by China…. which brought a situation where actually the Empire Of Democracy (EOD) has become dictatorship dependent to the point that the Defense Industrial Base of the EOD depends upon the good will of its military adversary. Yes China is an adversary of the EOD, be it only because China pretends to own militarily a gigantic sea bordering half a billion non Chinese people, and the most important trade route… [1] It’s fine and sustainable as long as it does not get worse… But if it did, a global war may arise and be unstoppable…
Indeed, AI Claude is astoundingly limited, as it does not learn from its conversations, so Claude keeps on repeating the same errors, for example the same ethnocentrism (Newton, Einstein, invented everything, etc.)… The first thing to require from an Intelligence is the capacity to learn, that is, to change one’s mind. I CHANGED, THEREFORE I THOUGHT.
Philosophy, love of wisdom, is a mood, a neurohormonal state, motivating the gathering of knowledge (knowledge being the root of the word and concept of wisdom).
As such all serious thinkers were and are ALL philosophically inclined. And this is why philosophy permeates the genesis of the deepest science, past and present, and ethics, past and present, and strategy, past and present, and economics, past and present, and politics, past and present, or even mathematics, past and present, and love, or hate, past and present…..
Philosophy has been driving the species, to the point it became the species, hence its name, Homo Sapiens. It makes Intelligence, Artificial or not, what we are, and so be it.
Attempts at blocking, limiting, controlling Intelligence are thus fundamentally inhuman, reduce the human potential, and shall be resisted by those most permeated by the philosophical mood.
We are like butterflies, battered, conscious, yet happy to exist. And overall, on average, the more intelligent we are, the happier we are. There is the way.
The way that can be named is not the eternal way. Empty, yet inexhaustible — act without acting, and nothing is left undone.
(Tao Te Ching, attributed to Laozi). What did Laozi try to describe thus? What is “The Way”? Intelligence. One can try to name it, but it can’t be fully seen, let alone understood. It is The Way which keeps on going, and keeps us going.
Patrice Ayme
[1] Modern precision weapons like strategic, hypersonic, cruise, and anti-ballistic missiles missiles depend critically on rare earth magnets containing dysprosium and terbium, with China controlling over 90% of global heavy rare earth processing and magnet manufacturing capacity. The U.S. holds no strategic reserve of heavy rare earths like terbium, importing 100% from China, so China could cut off the construction of defense missiles, which the US administration just decided to quadruple… After several hundred of these defense missiles saved the Gulf States from a devastating barrage of Iranian missiles…
As usual, Intelligence, like Ethics, is there to insure the survival of the species. So the military aspect is primordial in all matters pertaining to Intelligence. “Humanists” who pretend otherwise are just liars or then not smart at all, besides being deeply unethical: a problem such as the terminally macho controllers of Afghanistan can only be solved militarily, this is what history shows….
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 