but your services are no longer required by this mission.
The New York Times reports that the complex analyses formerly undertaken by cohorts of high-priced attorneys and legions of clerks and paralegals can now be assigned in large part to computer software. This suggests to me that Ray Kurzweil’s “singularity,” in the unlikely event it occurs as he envisions it, will have been preceded for some years by mass layoffs among the cognitive classes, who will doubtless be disappointed to learn that only our oligarchs will have the medical means and longevity to be transmuted into silicon.
Machine intelligence, and in particular machine “understanding” of human language, appears to have just lit up its afterburners during the past few years. I've long considered the “Turing Test” to have been a faulty threshold for assessing electronic sentience, and even if it weren’t, you can bet that the first time a galaxy of algorithms persuasively holds up its end of an informal and discursive conversation, the goalposts will be moved out to the parking lot. By decade’s end, though, we’re going to share the economy with a complex agglomeration of automated subroutines that will certainly appear to be sentient (should the actual condition be attained, the fact of it will likely be recognized only some time after it occurs), and this development will be, to say the least, fraught. What a shame it is to think that such fabulous power and potential will be wielded in the service of ever-more pitiless efficiencies on behalf of late-stage capitalism, the present-day inhumanity of which scarcely stands in need of such literal augmentation...
No comments:
Post a Comment