{"id":1137,"date":"2008-06-14T15:48:35","date_gmt":"2008-06-14T21:48:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=1137"},"modified":"2008-06-14T15:48:35","modified_gmt":"2008-06-14T21:48:35","slug":"hofstadter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1137","title":{"rendered":"Hofstadter on AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaking of the Singularity – and how can you avoid it, really, these days? – Douglas Hofstadter, author of the classic G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach<\/i> as well as, more recently, I Am a Strange Loop<\/i>, spots<\/a> the misanthropy that lies beneath the sunny surfaces of the AI millennialists and many other techno-utopians:<\/p>\n

\n

Am I disappointed by the amount of progress in cognitive science and AI in the past 30 years or so? Not at all. To the contrary, I would have been extremely upset if we had come anywhere close to reaching human intelligence \u2014 it would have made me fear that our minds and souls were not deep. Reaching the goal of AI in just a few decades would have made me dramatically lose respect for humanity, and I certainly don’t want (and never wanted) that to happen …<\/p>\n

Do I still believe it will happen someday? I can’t say for sure, but I suppose it will eventually, yes. I wouldn’t want to be around then, though. Such a world would be too alien for me. I prefer living in a world where computers are still very very stupid. And I get a huge kick out of laughing at the hilariously unpredictable inflexibility of the computer models of mental processes that my doctoral students and I co-design. It helps remind me of the immense subtlety and elusiveness of the human mind.<\/p>\n

Indeed, I am very glad that we still have a very very long ways to go in our quest for AI. I think of this seemingly \u201cpessimistic\u201d view of mine as being in fact a profound kind of optimism, whereas the seemingly \u201coptimistic\u201d visions of Ray Kurzweil and others strike me as actually being a deeply pessimistic view of the nature of the human mind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaking of the Singularity – and how can you avoid it, really, these days? – Douglas Hofstadter, author of the classic G\u00f6del, Escher, Bach as well as, more recently, I Am a Strange Loop, spots the misanthropy that lies beneath the sunny surfaces of the AI millennialists and many other techno-utopians: Am I disappointed by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}