Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 35, No. 373.
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        Date: 2021-11-29 07:55:43+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: convergence and divergence

Here's a problem. I'd like to know if anyone has given thought to it.

The steady work in computer science and engineering, including robotics
and AI, to make computing systems more like ourselves has not yet, and
likely never will, equal the promotional rhetoric with which we are
bombarded, but its incremental success can hardly be challenged. At the
same time, notably with Deep Mind's AlphaGo Zero, significant
divergences have emerged between human and artificial intelligences,
e.g. moves in Go that no one in the last few millennia of the game have
thought of before. Actually, divergence of human and artificial
intelligences began with the digital machine and have antecedents going
way back, made less obvious than should be by regarding them as failures
to be intelligent, or as intelligent, smart etc.

The interesting problem for us, it seems to me, lies in the interplay
between convergence and divergence. How can it be used in beneficial ways?

Comments?

Yours,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews;  Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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