Informational pseudo-weakness

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Ray Kurzweil is a legendary person without exaggeration. On his victories in the field of computer science, he was congratulated by US Presidents Lyndon Johnson (Ray was then 20 years old) and Bill Clinton, who presented Kurzweil in 1999 with the "Information Nobel" - National Medal of Technology.

Kurzweil created the first musical synthesizer, was the first to teach computers to recognize human speech. And these are just his personal achievements, not counting the work for Google, IBM, etc. Now Kurzweil is working on the consciousness of an assistant, "able to answer questions - even before you formulate them." No I am not joking. This quote.

However, Ray Kurzweil, of course, is better known as a futurist. In The Age of Spiritual Machines, he formulated the “Law of Accelerating Returns,” which allows him to predict advances in computer technology and artificial intelligence with amazing accuracy - literally over the years.

Kurzweil's predictions come true with frightening accuracy: phones with bluetooth, simultaneous computer translation, Siri, 3D video and glasses with augmented reality, the IBM Watson supercomputer, Google cars without drivers, etc., etc. But these are all berries …

Kurzweil is ready to go down the tracks like Yeltsin, if by 2029 the computer fails to pass the "Turing test". That is, he is sure that the machine will soon demonstrate to us the ability not only to think, but also to experience emotions, to understand metaphors, and will have “subjective experience” and a sense of humor.

Now, please think about it: after some 15 years, sitting at a computer, you will not be able to understand who your interlocutor is - a real person or a machine (this, in fact, is the "Turing test").

The question, in fact, is different: will a real person cope with the "Turing test" in 2029?..

While artificial intelligence is trying to grow exponentially by learning to create complex intelligent objects, human brains have gone in a strictly opposite direction. We develop a kind of “like thinking”: if we like it, we like it, if we don’t like it, we move on. Simple, fun, scandalous - yes, we are interested. Difficult, seriously, you need to think about it - we scroll. We seem to be switching to binary code - like those machines - 0 and 1, 1 and 0. To linear thinking!

“I was told that each formula included in the book would halve the number of buyers,” Stephen Hawking writes in the foreword to his A Brief History of Time. Although, to be honest, this is where any book on physics should be finished …

Anatoly Nikolaevich Alekhin, introducing the concept of pseudo-debility, proceeds from the clinical picture of the actual disease. What is the manifestation of the usual, normal, so to speak, mental retardation? A patient with a corresponding diagnosis is intellectually passive, acts impulsively, cannot concentrate attention for a long time, thinks very concretely and utilitarianly, does not like or understand abstract reasoning. Doesn't this remind you of anything?.. The average user of social networks, for example?

There is only one difference from clinical moronic debility in pseudo-debility: a clinical moron can in no way and under no circumstances be forced to think more difficult - the very state of his "gray cells" does not imply this, complex intellectual objects do not add up in his head, whatever you do with him …

But the "gray matter" of the informational pseudo-moron is preserved, and, in principle, his brain can be trained. But why? No, not why train him, but why should he train? What's the point? Will he somehow be specially respected for this? Or, on the contrary, will they be ashamed that he is a fool? Or will he not survive without it? No.

The problem of 2029 and the upcoming Turing test for machines and humans is no joke at all. Already now the real world is so complex that not a single person is able to comprehend the processes taking place in it at least to some extent.

We have long needed to understand the threat posed by this new for our brains - hyperinformation - environment. Understand and start working on self-defense methods, that is, to engage in genuine information security.

But we didn’t understand, didn’t prepare and, perhaps, were even late. How else to explain the fact that the public, who cannot imagine their life without electricity, modern medicine and mobile communications, continues to grab onto the shroud, which, by the way, have been subjected to radiocarbon analysis, and pray for monarchic bones that have passed a preliminary DNA test?

How can this obvious oxymoron fit into the human head ?! Only if there is no structure at all.