Would you like to hear Douglas Rushkoff’s thoughts on Artificial Intelligence? Douglas Rushkoff, a writer, documentarian, and lecturer whose work focuses on human autonomy in a digital age, was on London Real. He shared his thoughts on some issues including Artificial Intelligence. Where is Artificial Intelligence going? Where is it now? How is it going to affect us? Will it become thought or never? were a few of the questions he answered there.
“Watson is AI and is glorified search. It’s search that has the natural language recognition. So it can do, it can search stuff and then it can access stuff. Well that’s great for playing jeopardy or it can process out. Ten thousand permutations of a chess game for the next eight moves which is great for beating Kasparov at chess. But, it’s not intelligence as a Buddhist would understand. Intelligence is not the element air. It’s something else.”
“I understand that there’s money in it, and that’s why google is pushing it. They push way ahead of Apple and SIRI with the Google’s natural language work and and its capabilities, but it’s really right now I think of it as search not as as thought.”
Will it become thought or never?
“It will get more complicated. But it’s never contemplating. Its concluding. It’s searching. It’s aggregating and concatenating. And it even can go fuzzy. So, it’s kind of this. But it’s never staying in between the two things. It’s like a snap to grid in money or in a graphics program. It’s here or here here or here. It’s never right there which is where humans live.”
“We don’t know when we can sort of live with that and it’s scary and weird and intimate little as a gay it’s not as whether that you know all that stuff that freaks us out. It’s not binary, but it and it’s not together. It’s something else.”
“Computers AI don’t know that they don’t they don’t live in that liminal realm and that’s intelligence to me is the ability to tolerate that to experience the all without freaking out. It’s a very psychedelic thing. How do you be there without having a bad trip? Or how do you understand that the only good trip is a bad trip you know that you? Get through there yeah, and that’s a human thing.”
Douglas Rushkoff is a writer, documentarian, and lecturer whose work focuses on human autonomy in a digital age. He is the author of fifteen bestselling books on media, technology, and society, including Program or Be Programmed, Present Shock, and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. He has made such award-winning PBS Frontline documentaries as Generation Like, Merchants of Cool, and The Persuaders, and is the author of graphic novels including Testament and Aleister & Adolf.
Rushkoff is the recipient of the Marshall McLuhan Award for his book Coercion, The Jacques Ellul Award for his documentary The Merchants of Cool, and the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. Named one of the world’s ten most influential intellectuals by MIT, he is responsible for originating such concepts as “viral media,” “social currency,” and “digital natives.” Today, Dr. Rushkoff serves as Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens, where he recently founded the Laboratory for Digital Humanism and hosts its TeamHuman podcast. He is also a research fellow at the Institute for the Future, and an advisor to Meetup, Shareable, and Codecademy.
