In Consideration of Intelligent Machines

 

Originally, when we were impossibly naive, we would respond to René Descartes’ assertion that one thinks therefore one is by saying how is the thinking thing and the thing that ‘is’ for sure the same thing. They are the same thing because they are separate and also united and this is the nature of molecular life, everything opened up upon a great singular multiplicity, as made plenty clear by physicists and also by philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his compatriote professionnel, institutional psychiatrist Félix Guattari, he of transversal intra-complexive modalities and profound respect for psychotic/schizo insights. The spiritual history of man is his geology, layers stacked upon layers, and even the most dead and inert material things, a stone or a dead branch, are positively bustling. It has been averred that Albert Einstein fell into ultimate despair of his desired but unobtainable ‘unified field theory,’ but let’s a moment get more visceral and say that what stymied and ultimately defeated Einstein were the abysses and voids in the math, a conundrum that has driven future theoretical mathematicians and physicists to get into the racket in the first place! We know electrons and protons communicate across time in ways that defy our metrics, and I guess we know that there is dark energy and dark matter, because even though we have no means of perceiving, measuring, or assessing these opaque principles nowhere to be physically found in physical fact, the mathematics seems to require them. Where is the math headed, right? Artificial Intelligence, all across the line, running your air traffic and city traffic et cetera. And why not? Artificial Intelligence can do wild kinds of math it can’t even explain to us, so pitiably equipped are we. In 2019, the great engineer, inventor, and polymath James Lovelock, who would die in 2022 at the age of 103, argues stridently and pretty convincingly in his book Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence that incomprehensibly intelligent machines and silicon-based life will bring intelligence to bear everywhere it is lacking, and sorely so, taking control out of the hands of human beings so wonky in their daily toil and folly that they're wont on occasion to drop souped-up bat viruses on the floor ‘cause they ain’t taking their damn time…and so forth.