Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 66.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
                   Hosted by King's Digital Lab
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2019-06-03 18:00:51+00:00
        From: Patricia Galloway 
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.63: the space in-between

For the space(s) in-between I say (and may have said before on this
list) read James P. Hogan, The Two Faces of Tomorrow. People who give us
believable fiction may be making more sense than Big Industry. How to
constrain... plus, go ask anyone who deals with classification that
deals with natural language how long that classification will last.

Pat Galloway

On 6/2/2019 12:02 AM, Humanist wrote:
>                    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 McCarty 
>          Subject: 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)




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