The Hunt For Technological Supremacy may be Hurting Our Collective humanity

Keep on the sidelines; you are lagging the advancement of the humanity. We are past the point of usefulness for Homo Sapiens, so now it is the sunrise of the Homo Faber period. The distinction that “I therefore think that I think so I am” has ended up endearing in this bright new age of constructors and creators. Nevertheless, has our ongoing fixation with adaptation and advancement successfully underpinned our skill for humanity?

Technoscience triumphed in the twentieth century; however, questionable actions to it proceeded, too. Hannah Arendt, the philosopher, made renowned by her phrase “the banality of evil,” referencing the Nazi Nuremberg tests, argued that Comte’s technoscience — which, by the middle of the twentieth century, certainly had not lost any type of steam as a brilliant philosophical concept totaled up to no less than a redefinition of humanity itself. Arendt indicated the classic understanding of humans as Homo sapiens — literally meaning, “wise man” — and to the historical focus on wisdom and knowledge rather than technical skill, and suggested that to welcome technoscience as a worldview was to redefine ourselves as Homo Faber — “man the builder.”

Homo Faber, in Greek, is a person that believes that techne — the knowledge of craft or making things, the essence of technology — defines who we are. The faberian understanding of humanity fits not only with Comte’s nineteenth-century concept of optimistic technoscience but also with the twentieth-century fixation with building an increasing number of effective technologies, culminating in the grand job of effectively constructing ourselves artificial intelligence. This project would not make sense if the conventional notions of the definition of humanity remained undamaged.

Arendt suggested that the seismic change from wisdom and knowledge to technology and building represented a restricting and potentially hazardous understanding of ourselves, which would undoubtedly guarantee not only that technological development would continue unbridled, but that significantly we would see technical successes as meaningful statements about ourselves. We were, simply put, decreasing our well worth to enhance, past wise or affordable procedure, our estimate of the marvels that could be built with the tools of technoscience.

Von Neumann’s originally cryptic remarks regarding coming close to a “singularity” as technical advancements increase ended up being extra clear due to his contemporary Arendt’s position. Though Von Neumann, a researcher, and mathematician, did not (as far as we know) further clarify his comments, they perfectly show Arendt’s insistence on the profound value of technoscience for ourselves and our future, for what philosophers of innovation call “the human condition.”

It would possibly seem depraved to Comte that technology might speed up past our control. However, no place in his writing can one uncover a hint of the point that Arendt (and others) would certainly make, that in promoting technoscience as a human solution to human troubles, we also participate in the task of redefining our understanding of ourselves. The turn towards techne instead of episteme (knowledge of natural phenomena) or sapiential (wisdom connecting to human values and society) makes it challenging to carve out a significant suggestion of human individuality. (Even bees are all builders in their situation of hives).

Placing techne at the center also makes it possible to see a person as something that can be constructed since it suggests there is nothing more to an individual than a remarkable capability to construct more advanced innovations. Once started this path, it is a short journey to artificial intelligence. Furthermore, here is the apparent tie-in with the intelligence errors initially made by Turing and after that expanded by Jack Good and others and others up to the present day: the utmost triumph of Homo Faber as a species is to construct itself. This, of course, is precisely the professed goal of AI. It is discovering whether the project can succeed or if it will necessarily pull us right into the deep waters of comprehending the nature of ourselves.

Read the original article on engadget.

Reference: Excerpted from The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do by Erik J Larson, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2021 by Erik J. Larson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.