Modernity attempts to achieve control through formalization. The great triumphs of modern natural science have come from exact measurement and mathematical modelling. Similarly, modern political and social systems substitute the simple and abstract concept of preference—the tendency of actors to choose some things over other things—for the more complex and subtle concept of the good. They then attempt to maximize the satisfaction of preference by replacing opaque concrete things like family, faith and ethnic culture with transparent formal systems like world markets and transnational bureaucracies. Since modern formal systems can supposedly be made ever more efficient, rational and reliable, while traditional arrangements can’t be managed and therefore supposedly can’t be relied on for anything, attachment to the latter has come to be viewed as ignorant, irrational and hateful.
The ultimate example of modernist formalization would be strong AI—artificial intelligence that can equal (and in very short order vastly surpass) human intellectual capacities. The success or failure of strong AI appears to be the key to the future of humanity. If strong AI is possible, so that anything we can do a computer can do far better, man becomes obsolete and as such will be replaced. So there’s some interest in recent setbacks to attempts to design computers that can outplay any human grandmaster in chess, with Garry Kasparov playing the part of a more-successful John Henry: man against the machine.
worry not
As a researcher in the field of AI, I can tell you with great confidence that strong AI won’t be appearing any time soon. Everything that computers do better than humans rests on fast number crunching and vast amounts of memory. Even the best AI programs have the creative and imaginative capacities of a rock.
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That’s my post above.