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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 63. Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London Hosted by King's Digital Lab www.dhhumanist.org Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org Date: 2019-06-01 05:52:04+00:00 From: Willard McCartySubject: the space in-between Thanks to Jim Rovira for a good statement of our current ignorance about what an artificial intelligence would be or require. (I like to think in terms of one fully realised in its own terms rather than ours.) I was addressing the question of what we digitally preoccupied scholars, technicians and scholar-technicians in the human sciences do at this point to get further with that question, with turning our questions into better ones. I think we can do more than just sit and wait for others, e.g. the cognitive scientists, though paying attention to them is indeed part of the way beyond where we are. So let me ask a methodological question: how do we probe a subject about which little can be known at this point, or perhaps ever? (I note the urgency of having something intelligent to say about research and engineering that almost certainly will affect us all significantly.) The old, indeed likely primaeval approach is to proceed by analogy. Where else do we find the question I raised being asked, or if not asked then even implicitly raised? Where else have scholars worked on situations in which humans figure things out by means of manipulable things? How far have they managed to go, and what have they discovered, or what impediments have they encountered? If, as I believe, we must look outside of the European-American cultural orbit and beyond the present time, i.e. anthropologically and historically, then what sort of activities come into focus, and what do we know about them? Here, I think, is a golden opportunity to do some good in the world as scholars who are uniquely positioned to address the purblindness in which Big Industry is working. More comments? Yours, WM -- Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/), Professor emeritus, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London; Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (www.tandfonline.com/loi/yisr20) and Humanist (www.dhhumanist.org) _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted List posts to: humanist@dhhumanist.org List info and archives at at: http://dhhumanist.org Listmember interface at: http://dhhumanist.org/Restricted/ Subscribe at: http://dhhumanist.org/membership_form.php
Editor: Willard McCarty (King's College London, U.K.; Western Sydney University, Australia)
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