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

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

By being too distant and dispassionate could our writers, judges, social theorists and others in the public space be accused of not bestowing requisite warmth and empathy in their actions and pronouncements? Is it in other words proper to apply the above praxis of detachment in all human encounters that call for the use of both judgement and empathy and compassion? T he defendant is one of six accused of not having gone to the aid of several hundred women prisoners locked into a church that was later bombed by the Allies. All defendants were women guards at a Nazi satellite concentration camp near Auschwitz. Photo: Edward Onslow Ford , Justice , partie d'un monument au maharajah de Mysore During a moment in the trial the defendant does not apparently know what she should or could have done differently. She therefore poses that question to the judge asking him what he would have done. The judge replies that there are matters “one could not get drawn into”. By using the

This is perhaps the irony of life: we would like our lives to last as long as possible: but how do we live with its exhausting continuity? M ost of us have a Janus-like approach to the temporality of our lives: we have one eye on the past and one on the future with no time for the present. With the past, we have this persistent urge to dissect it and in the process are swayed by a whole gamut of feelings and emotions. We recall with evident pleasure some of these past events. Some of us are so proud of our journey so far and our previous ports of call – and confident that others will wish to celebrate this voyage and emulate it even – that we publish memoirs or at least ask others peep into our private lives via things like social media. And we may regret too that some events had not happened and attempt to suppress these memories whenever they try to escape their hiding places in our minds. In his magnificent novel, The Towers of Silence , Paul Scott uses the tin-trunk that M

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

The reality (however relative) and nature of time appear inexorable and inescapable. One way to cope with this fact is to tell others and share with them our thoughts, feelings and stories – a bit like unity in the face of a common enemy. “ F or whom am I writing this?” wonders eighty-two year old Iris Chase Griffen in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin . “For myself? I think not. I have no picture of myself reading it over at a later time, later time having become problematical. For some stranger, in the future, after I’m dead? I have no such ambition, no such hope.” [i] Many of us are afflicted by this bug for writing – writing in some form or the other, dashing off letters, composing something creative and, if nothing else, at least keeping diaries and journals. George Orwell thought that there were four great motives for writing and they are to be found to different degrees in every writer. We were firstly driven to write by “sheer egoism”, a “desire to seem clever, to be