#mythofthemachine — Public Fediverse posts

.> As an instrument for organizing large quantities of information, or performing extremely complex symbolic operations beyond human capabilities within a normal lifespan, the computer is an invaluable adjunct to the brain, though not a substitute for it. Since the computer is limited to handling only so much experience as can be abstracted in symbolic or numerical form, it is incapable of dealing directly, as organisms must, with the steady influx of concrete, unprogrammable experience. With respect to such experience, the computer is necessarily always out of date. The computer's lack of other human dimensions is of course no handicap to it as a labor-saving device, whether in astronomy or bookkeeping: but such creativity as the computer may simulate is always in the first place a contribution of the minds that formulate the program.

.> The utter absence of innate subjective potentialities in the computer makes the contemporary art exhibition shown here (top), in all its pervasive blankness and artful nullity, and ideal representation of its missing dimensions. Those who are so fascinated by the computer’s lifelike feats---it plays chess! it writes ‘poetry’!---that they would turn it[AISalami] into the voice of omniscience, betray how little understanding they have of either themselves, their mechanical-electronic agents, or the potentialities of life. A city of even three hundred thousand people, ten per cent of whom have access to regional or national libraries with as few as a million volumes, would actually have a total capacity for storing, transforming, integrating, and not least applying both symbolic information and concrete experience that no computer will ever rival.

> ... [If] we now overvalue the machine, is it not because the mechanistic doctrine which has made us competent to design machines and control them also promises to give the scientist an equal hold over the living organisms he unfeelingly identifies with machines? In a world of machines, or of creatures that can be reduced to machines, technocrats would indeed be gods.
#LewisMumford in #MythOfTheMachine: #PentagonOfPower on #AI #ChatBot #ChatGPT #OverClaims and hype, but in 1970: same pattern

> ... [If after] four centuries.. we now overvalue the machine, is it not because the mechanistic doctrine which has made us competent to design machines and control them also promises to give the scientist an equal hold over the living organisms he unfeelingly identifies with machines? In a world of machines, or of creatures that can be reduced to machines, #technocrats would.. be gods. --- #LewisMumford, #MythOfTheMachine: #PentagonOfPower. p 72
1970 #Mumford on #Tech #RichGuy #AIHype

Winona LaDuke's tone, chiding a little boy, in her open letter to Shopping-Car-Space-Guy (SNS-buyer) seems appropriate. An illustration and it's description, an astronaut as capsule-man, came to mind from Lewis Mumford's #MythOfTheMachine #PentagonOfPower(1971)

#Mumford #LewisMumford #MythOfTheMachine #PentagonOfPower #SpaceGuy #Astrounauts #ElonMusk