NN The Borg or Borges?

[pynchonoid]

>From the current issue of JCS:

William Irwin Thompson

The Borg or Borges?

It is a paradox of the work of Artificial Intelligence
that in order to 
grant consciousness to machines, the engineers first
labour to subtract 
it from humans, as they work to foist upon
philosophers a caricature of 
consciousness in the digital switches of weights and
gates in neural 
nets. As the caricature goes into public circulation
with the help of 
the media, it becomes an acceptable counterfeit
currency, and the 
humanistic philosopher of mind soon finds himself
replaced by the 
robotics scientist. This atmospheric inversion from
above to below, one 
in which a sky turns into the smog of a thickened air,
happened once 
before in the world of knowledge, when Comtian
positivism inspired a 
functionalist approach to the study of the sacred. The
social scientists 
first said that in order to study the sacred, one had
to study how it 
functioned in society; then having contributed to the
growth of their 
own academic domain, they more confidently claimed
that what humans 
worshipped with the sacred was, in fact, their own
society. There simply 
was no such thing as God or the sacred, and so Schools
of Divinity began 
to be eclipsed by the elevation of the new towers of
the office 
buildings of the Social Sciences. Indeed, as I turn
now away from my 
computer screen, I can see outside
my window the William James Building of Social
Relations competing for 
domi-nance of the skyline with the Victorian brick
Gothic of Harvard's 
Memorial Hall.

This clever move to eliminate the phenomenological
reality of human 
con-sciousness as a prelude to the growth of a new
robotics industry is 
a very successful scam, for it has helped enormously
with the task of 
fund-raising for costly moon shots, such as the
Japanese government's 
'Fifth Generation Computer Project' which promised to
create an 
autonomously thinking machine in the 1980s. No one
seems to talk much 
anymore about the failure of this project, but the
gurus of A.I. 
continue to prophesy - as Ray Kurzweil now does - that
by 2030, humans 
will be surpassed by machines in cultural evolution.

Both the mechanists and the mystics say that we are
now at a great 
bifurcation
in human evolution. The mechanists like Ray Kurzweil,
Danny Hillis and 
Hans
Moravec prophesy that we are at the end of the human
era, and that 
'nanobots' are about to be embedded in our bodies
until our antique 
organs of flesh are entirely surrounded by a new
silicon noosphere of 
networked computers . . .

Full text:
<http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/WI_Thompson.pdf>


[...] If our world survives, the next great challenge
to watch out for will come -- you heard it here first
-- when the curves of research and development in
artificial intelligence, molecular biology and
robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and
unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us
devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It
is certainly something for all good Luddites to look
forward to if, God willing, we should live so long.
Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however
minimal and cold, from Lord Byron's mischievously
improvised song, in which he, like other observers of
the time, saw clear identification between the first
Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It begins:

As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!





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