Hi everyone,
I have a portrait of Hannah Arendt above my desk where I’m typing. She was the German-Jewish philosopher who fled to the United States in the late 1930s as the Nazis rose to power. In New York, she would eventually reconnect with her onetime mentor and former Nazi sympathizer, Martin Heidegger. They had an affair, but it was Arendt I cared more about reading.
The question of “intelligence” doesn’t belong to either of them directly, but technology was central to their work and their lives. In that, Arendt benefited deeply from the older Heidegger. Yet it was Arendt, not Heidegger, who would coin the phrase “the banality of evil” when The New Yorker sent her to cover the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. And it was Arendt who, as a frightened young woman, escaped the wave of anti-Jewish violence that would soon engulf Germany and the world. That’s the face above my desk when I write.
The question of intelligence isn’t something technology can illuminate. The calculator told us nothing meaningful about thought. IBM’s Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov in 1997 told us nothing either. Nor did Google’s AlphaGo defeating Lee Sedol in 2016. These were feats of computation, not insight. And our latest text extruding gizmos, these prompt-response systems we call “AI,” tell us nothing new about intelligence. We are stuck in a familiar trap: short-term gain, long-term loss. We’re stuck squaring the circle that big money and big tech wants us to…. that it’s “intelligence.” This deprivation, not intelligence.
I wish Arendt were here to see this. We’re haunted by what we didn’t understand then, and we will no doubt be haunted about what we pretend to understand now.
Those hungry eyes, those hungry fucking eyes, say a lot more about intelligence than any machine ever will.
-Erik J. Larson
I understand you wish she were here - because she had what you lack (and most everyone else, too): The ability to use human intelligence to get to the core of seemingly intractable issues, in her case specifically the nature of tyranny and fascism and how it depends on the collusion of the population (under the control of a culture that evolves by it's own mechanisms). She didn't really get to the end of it, but it's a starting-point to build on - but that, too, requires the human intelligence she had - and that has pretty much vanished - abolished by a culture which makes us humans think - just like AI (which we designed to think like we do nowadays) - so frantically looking up information, which we don't understand - and so we frantically look up opinions of "authorities" - and predictions of "experts" - and can at best concoct a cocktail of false facts and half-baked opinions - and have no outlook of value - again, just like AI.
So that is the question to you: What was human itelligence as demonstrated by Arendt (or Einstein, Russell, Gandhi, MLK, Mandela, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky - to name but a few) - and how can we reactivate it? BTW, a crucial question to make AI more than degenerated human intelligence (of te kind prevalent today) supercharged with brute force.