| Abstract | It is a well-known fact that AI research seeks both to reproduce the outcome
of our intelligent behaviour by non-biological means, and to produce the
non-biological equivalent of our intelligence. On the one hand, as a branch
of engineering interested in intelligent behaviour reproduction, AI has been
astoundingly successful, well beyond the rosiest expectations. On the other
hand, as a branch of cognitive science interested in intelligence
production, AI has been a dismal disappointment. In order to escape the
dichotomy just outlined, one needs to realise that AI pursues neither a
descriptive nor a prescriptive approach to the world: it investigates the
constraining conditions that make it possible to build and embed artefacts
in the world and interact with it successfully. In other words, it inscribes
the world, for such artefacts are new logico-mathematical pieces of code,
that is, new texts, written in Galileo’s mathematical book of nature. Until
recently, the widespread impression was that such a process of adding to the
mathematical book of nature (inscription) required the feasibility of
productive AI. Such an impression is not incorrect, but it is distracting.
For while we were pursuing the task of inscribing productive AI in the
world, the world itself quietly but steadily began to adapt to reproductive
AI. Digital ICTs are transforming the very nature of (and hence what we mean
by) the infosphere, while the infosphere is progressively becoming the world
in which we live. In recent years, the infosphere has been adapting to
AI-limited capacities increasingly well. Using a term from robotics, we have
been enveloping the world without fully realising it. In this talk, I shall
analyse this phenomenon of “enveloping” and outline some its risks, in order
to highlight our responsibilities. |
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