Gaming AI by George Gilder

Author:George Gilder [Gilder, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-936599-88-2
Publisher: Discovery Institute Press
Published: 2020-10-18T21:00:00+00:00

4. IS REALITY BINARY?

THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM OF THE AI VISION WAS EXPLAINED in the early twentieth century by philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. In a critique of binary logic consisting of objects and their symbols, he showed that all mental activity is triadic. It comes in threes rather than twos. It connects objects and symbols through an interpretant. All software and hardware, mathematical models and projections, computational simulations and logical extrapolations, depend on maps: translations of physical entities into symbols. Maps consist of distillations of objects into representations of them.

The problem is that the map is not the territory. Whether in a mathematical equation or a mathematical model consisting of functions and equations, or in a neural network reflecting a sensorium of global measurements, AI supremacy assumes the essential identity of sufficiently refined maps and territories. AI is based on manipulating symbols as sufficient and reliable representations of their objects.

By asserting that there is always a gap between the object and the symbol, Peirce foreshadowed the coming of the AI emperor and his new clothes. Whether a number or a word or alphanumeric code or an analog report from a sensor, the symbol is always intrinsically different from the object it designates or describes.

Denying this cognitive and interpretive gap, the AI movement does not banish it. Instead the singularity movement simply explains it away. It correctly declares that any gap also afflicts human intelligence, and thus is irrelevant to a contest between humans and machines. The AI triumphalists assume that like two runners fleeing a grizzly bear, the artificial mind will prevail merely by exceeding its rival, in this case the human mind.

The difference is that humans are deeply and perpetually aware of the gap between their senses and recollections, intuitions and interpretations, maps and territories. The gap is the very vessel and condition, warp and womb of thought. The gap is the channel of interpretation between symbols and objects.

Denying the interpretant does not remove the gap. It remains intractably present. If the inexorable uncertainty, complexity, and information overflows of the gap are not consciously recognized and transcended, the gap fills up with noise. Congesting the gap are surreptitious assumptions, ideology, bias, manipulation, and static. AI triumphalism allows it to sink into a chaos of constantly changing but insidiously tacit interpretations.

Ultimately AI assumes a single interpretant created by machine learning as it processes ever more zettabytes of data and converges on a single interpretation. This interpretation is always of a rearview mirror. Artificial intelligence is based on an unfathomably complex and voluminous look at the past. But this look is always a compound of slightly wrong measurements, thus multiplying its errors through the cosmos. In the real world, by contrast, where interpretation is decentralized among many individual minds—each person interpreting each symbol—mistakes are limited, subject to ongoing checks and balances, rather than being inexorably perpetuated onward.

Reality does not gather in data centers or clouds; it is intrinsically distributed in human minds. The reach toward unity is essentially religious, as each human aspires toward a creator that he can never fully know.

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