{AK}: “(Microsoft) Cognitive Services”, is on the Azure, cloud platform. I looked at that, a few months ago, it’s very good.
[Fabio Moioli] “The improvements we are making in understanding speech and language are driving a paradigm shift, moving away from a world where we’ve had to understand computers to one where computers understand humans. We call this conversational AI. In addition, tools such as Microsoft Bot Framework, already used by 130.000+ AI developers, are helping people to interact in a more natural way with AI.”
{AK}: There are different ways of looking at that.
It contrasts two forms of understanding, ‘computing’ and ‘human’. But we must ask, on what basis, does this contrast obtain? Do not humans compute? What, really, is ‘computing’? What, really, is ‘human? Here’s what Sol Yurick has to say about it:
“With the invention of new sensing devices, new perceptual systems come on line. All beings are some function of their information intake, no matter how indirectly the information is received. What was done in the mind must now be done through computers … programs begin to become quasi-solidified thought. New procedures for action and behavior take the form of a ritual, requiring the playing of an excruciating game called programming. People resist? The languages are too hard, the steps too long and complicated? Money is now poured into developing computers that “talk English,” are touch-responsive or voice-activated. Computers for dummies.”
Sol Yurick, “Metatron”, in “Introduction”
If we look at things informationally, then there are only different systems, whether biological in form, or not. Arguably, everything ‘human’, is susceptible to cybernetic or systematic representation, and thus, to computability.
Equally, though, everything ‘human’, through this very computability, has the potential to re-present, and configure, cybernetic systems.
The establishment of the cybernetic algorithm as a wider worldly emphasis, is the mundane institutionalisation of the purposes originating that cybernetic algorithm.
As we have seen, cybernetic control is a two way street, and all its systems can be gamed, by anyone ‘determined’ to do so. Both the good and the bad, of the human experience, are susceptible to cybernetic inflation. As the technosphere steadily permeates the ‘world’ with its systems; and as those systems spread according to human modes of utility and weaponisation; the entire spectrum of irresponsibilities characterising humanity secretly configures that ‘world’, in its own image and only according to its horizon of possibilities. ([Fabio Moioli] “We are also infusing AI into every product and service we offer, from Xbox to Windows, from Bing to Office.”)
Relinquishing the obligation to understand anything that transcends average human capacities, whilst increasing use of powers transcending those capacities, leads only to scenarios of dangerously inflated ignorance. One in which the ‘lack of understanding’ referred to earlier, infects those transcendences. It is too easily observed, that average human capacities, en masse, prefer the insularity of ignorance to the efforts of understanding. When the lazy ecstasy of thoughtless irresponsibility prevails over the demands of deep consideration, only anthropic futility and the limited horizons of its insularity, are left, with regard to informed action. As in ancient times, religious soothsayers filled the gaps of an unknown future. So now, artificial intelligence constitutes another hallucinated configuration of salvation waved at anxieties over the future; another system of prescribed ritual to be followed; another prewritten and inhabitable document of cybernetic self-fulfilment! ([Fabio Moioli] “To conclude, as the computer scientist Alan Kay said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. Considering all of this, as an alternative, you may use Artificial Intelligence to predict it.”)