CHAPTER 12Chaos, Noise, and Epistemology in the Digital Age
In 1997, the most formidable chess player in the world was defeated by a machine in a six‐game match. The world watched with bated breath as Garry Kasparov, who had held the title of world champion for 12 years, represented humankind against the machine. For those packed into the sold‐out seats in the television studio and the millions of viewers who tuned into the matches at home,1 this had little to do with computation, simulation, or pattern recognition. Because chess is considered both an art and a science, blending left and right brain thinking, it substituted as a match of human intelligence versus machine intelligence.
Thirteen years after The Terminator was released, an emblem of human genius had been conquered by machines.
Chaos, Noise, and the Three Logical Fallacies
That story and the form of its telling is familiar to many. The tempting takeaway is that machines have reached another critical milestone in catching up to human intelligence, but further examination reveals three fallacies commonly at play in this assumption.
First, the slippery slope fallacy: an argument in which a party asserts or assumes that a small first step leads to a chain of related events, culminating in some significant (usually negative) effect. There are those who raise this argument with each step technology takes in any direction.
But human consciousness is irreducibly complex. The path to recreating consciousness is not an ...
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