Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at Aeon Conversations The internet has undoubtedly narrowed the spread of our geographic space. But does all this automatically translate to the world becoming better place, us better people? F rench Historian Fernand Braudel divided time into three scales: geographic, social (or sociological) and individual. We could apply such a triune categorisation to space too. We refer to geographic space when we say New York is around 10,000 miles from Sydney. Social space could refer to any space (more metaphoric than physical) that separates groups of humans from each other, be they family units, clans, ethnic groups, nation states or other artificial collections. Individual space is (more or less) what we commonly call personal space (my car, my house, my money). Murrumbidgee Rice Farm (CSIRO, 1991, Creative Commons) The internet has undoubtedly narrowed the girth of our geographic space and has helped us overcome “the tyran

This was originally posted on LinkedIn Pulse  on September 29, 2015.  While our technology companies have begun addressing the gap they appear to be flipping Snow’s question around In a July 2015 article,   Forbes magazine reported how a number of tech companies like Facebook and Uber have recently begun recruiting more non-technical graduates than tech ones. It appears that they think that “liberal arts thinking makes them stronger.” For instance, as Stewart Butterfield (CEO of Slack Technologies) noted, studying philosophy taught him how to write really clearly and also - even more significantly - to follow arguments all the way down “which is invaluable in running meetings.” Forbes cites observations also from how graduates from some universities in the last decade were tracked on LinkedIn. Only 30% of graduates from Northwestern University, for example, secured jobs in engineering or information technology. Most of the rest ended up with career paths in such fields as sa

We use the brain as an adjunct to our life, as a highly sophisticated tool to facilitate our actions. However, do the functions of the brain alone amply explain the whole of the human condition? W hen I throw a ball to someone else, I show the unfailing workings of a natural law. That however does not mean that I represent that law of physics, let alone become an embodiment of that law. Similarly, when a particular set of neurons in my brain gave rise to my intention to throw that ball, those neurons were merely involved in a physiological activity underlying that intention. That does not mean that this particular of set of neurons is the intention itself. My MP3 player tells me that exceeding a certain volume level may harm my hearing in the long term. By indicating that this man-made device is “telling me” something, I use here language that anthropomorphises an artefact. I could have said instead that a warning message is displayed on the music player's screen. But I use

The machines in this case exhibit not only vast intelligence but also considerable wisdom that far exceeds the purpose for which they were built and the algorithms that defined them. They have apparently acquired such wisdom by somehow transitioning from syntactics to semantics, gaining an ability to possess content and meaning. The leadys are not just a brain in a vat anymore; they are persons (or even better?) Will machines take over the world one day? This question has been in the news recently with leading thinkers like Professor Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk of Tesla expressing the worry that uncontrolled evolution of machine intelligence may one day presage the end of humanity. [i] This fear of rampant technology ruling the world is however is not of recent vintage, especially among the literati. Writers ranging from HG Wells and Aldous Huxley to more recent ones like Arthur C Clarke and scientist and writer Baroness Susan Greenfield have produced some well-known an

This was originally posted as a "viewpoint" at the Aeon Ideas Beta website - Aeon Ideas https://ideas.aeon.co/questions/should-we-be-worried-about-the-advancement-of-artificial-intelligence#viewpoint_2919 When we lack a precise definition of “intelligence”, we run the risk of jumbling run-of-the-mill machines with limited intelligence into a super-intelligent demon and fear that our microwave will one day take over our world. I n the “Art of War” Lao-Tzu stressed the importance of knowing thy enemy before going into battle. This includes getting a grip on your enemy’s strengths and weaknesses and the myths and misconceptions that surround him. To explain if we should fear developments in Artificial Intelligence we therefore need to firstly understand at least a bit of AI, cutting through the jargon in not only the techie journals and online fora but even mainstream media. It involves also distinguishing between (a) what AI-related developments – especially those