The AI Cargo Cult: The Myth of a Superhuman AI

Kevin Kelly
www.wired.com
Originally published April 25, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

The most common misconception about artificial intelligence begins with the common misconception about natural intelligence. This misconception is that intelligence is a single dimension. Most technical people tend to graph intelligence the way Nick Bostrom does in his book, Superintelligence — as a literal, single-dimension, linear graph of increasing amplitude. At one end is the low intelligence of, say, a small animal; at the other end is the high intelligence, of, say, a genius—almost as if intelligence were a sound level in decibels. Of course, it is then very easy to imagine the extension so that the loudness of intelligence continues to grow, eventually to exceed our own high intelligence and become a super-loud intelligence — a roar! — way beyond us, and maybe even off the chart.

This model is topologically equivalent to a ladder, so that each rung of intelligence is a step higher than the one before. Inferior animals are situated on lower rungs below us, while higher-level intelligence AIs will inevitably overstep us onto higher rungs. Time scales of when it happens are not important; what is important is the ranking—the metric of increasing intelligence.

The problem with this model is that it is mythical, like the ladder of evolution. The pre-Darwinian view of the natural world supposed a ladder of being, with inferior animals residing on rungs below human. Even post-Darwin, a very common notion is the “ladder” of evolution, with fish evolving into reptiles, then up a step into mammals, up into primates, into humans, each one a little more evolved (and of course smarter) than the one before it. So the ladder of intelligence parallels the ladder of existence. But both of these models supply a thoroughly unscientific view.

The information is here.

Some Popular Misconceptions of Philosophy

By Paul So
Facebook Post
September 29, 2013 at 2:47am

From my personal experience,  I have encountered many, many, and many misconceptions that people have about philosophy. I deliberately use the word "many" three times to emphasize that it can never be emphasized any less. I have encountered so many misconceptions that I practically lost count. I want to identify some of the most popular and common misconceptions people have about not only philosophy but what philosophers do in general. The origins of these misconceptions are not entirely known, but I suspect (as usual) that it is probably related to the mass media of popular culture.

While this may seem unfair to some readers, I want to focus specifically on what philosophers from the analytic traditions do. I admit that I do have a bias for analytic philosophy and I am personally not very fond of continental philosophy (partially because postmodernism is somewhat popular in that tradition), but I also want to say that I do not know very much about continental philosophy so I cannot judge what continental philosophers really do. Another reason is that important figures from continental philosophy such as Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger are often the public faces of philosophy that crowd out other equally important philosophers from the analytic tradition; analytic philosophers are largely underrepresented in the public (besides Peter Singer, Bertrand Russell, Patricia Churchland, and Noam Chomsky, who to some extent does worth within analytic tradition) compare to some historical figures associated with continental philosophy. So, I want to identify some popular misconceptions of philosophy and then explain why they are misconceptions from the point of view of analytic philosophy.

Here is a list of several popular misconceptions I come across.

(1) Philosophy is about finding the meaning of life, it is a quintessential spiritual enterprise to improve our way of life. 

The other misconceptions and entire Facebook post is here.