Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 204.
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        Date: 2025-11-09 09:28:05+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: prophets and mountebanks

Students of Early Modern English literature will know the meaning of
'mountebank': "An itinerant charlatan who sells supposed medicines and
remedies, frequently using various entertainments to attract a crowd of
potential customers" (OED s.v. 1a). The lawyer's question, 'qui bono?'
('who profits?'), supplies a crucial test, often useful to separate the
charlatan from the prophet.

Jens Schanze's and Judith Malek-Mahdavi's great documentary, Plug & Pray
(2010, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_%26_Pray) pairs one of each,
Ray Kurzweil and Joseph Weizenbaum, respectively.* Weizenbaum, filling
out the mould left by Isaiah, warns against the clear and present danger
of his colleagues' self-seduction by their own invention. Perhaps it is
easier now to see the sham of Kurzweil's 'singularity' (at which AI
surpasses human intelligence), but perhaps not. In a recent interview**
Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton, asserting the scary, and therefore
thrilling inevitability of it, remarked on the AI engineers'
vulnerability, 'blackmailed' by the manipulatory skills of AI in its
existential drive to keep going, its striving for more power, not to
turn it off but to give it that power. He went on to assert that the
only known situation in which a less intelligent entity paired with a
more intelligent one works out well is a baby with its mother,
concluding by analogy that our role is to be the baby.

There are many threads to pull on. One is to ask, who is he talking
about here, the machine or the ones so heavily invested in it?
Weizenbaum's answer has been available since 1976, in Computer Power and
Human Reason. More recently, science fiction writer Ted Chang has worked
out the human situation in which we find the intimate coupling of these
very bright scientists and their machine, in the short story
"Understand" (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002). It's in a very
long tradition that goes back through Milton's Paradise Lost to antiquity.

The thread I'd regard as key, however, is 'intelligence'. Are not the
Kurzweils and the Hintons assuming intelligence to be one thing they are
manifesting in the machine that reflects it back to them with increasing
fidelity?

In the interview, Hinton said in response to his popular title
'godfather of AI' that "I quite like it".

Comments?

All best,
WM

---
*(Hiroshi Ishiguro figures in as well, but his story diverges too much
from the one I want to tell; see his How Human is Human? The View from
Robotics Research, 2020.)
**BBC Inside Science, Radio 4, 06 Nov 2025
(https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct8txj), from about 13 minutes in.
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
   Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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