"Quote of the Week" is leisure reading in the assignment reminder email to my students.
***
"There is no time in our history in which the humanities, philosophy, ethics and art are more urgently necessary than in this time of technology's triumph," said Leon Wieseltier, the editor of Liberties, a humanistic journal. "Because we need to be able to think in nontechnological terms if we're going to figure out the good and the evil in all the technological innovations. Given society's craven worship of technology, are we going to trust the engineers and the capitalists to tell us what is right and wrong?"
Don't Kill 'Frankenstein' With Real Frankensteins at Large
May 27, 2023
By Maureen Dowd
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/27/opinion/english-humanities-ai.html
***
Many computer scientists utilize the Shoggoth, a fictitious octopus-like creature, to illustrate the bizarre traits of generative AI. [1] I draw a parallel to the Monkey King [2] in an upcoming short essay for the special issue of English Language Education. [3]
My analogy also emphasizes that while generative AI can imitate human-like behavior extraordinarily well, it is, in essence, non-human. The understanding of its cognitive patterns remains unknown to even its creators. In the Japanese televised adaptations of the Monkey King tales, the monk Tang Sanzang squeezes a restraining band around the head the Monkey King when it abuses its supernatural abilities. Additionally, the Monkey King found it impossible to escape from Buddha's hand no matter how hard it tried. These two episodes suggest that the extraordinary powers produced by non-human entities need to be governed by profound wisdom, symbolized here by the monk and Buddha.
Recently, many experts and public figures have endorsed the Statement on AI Risk: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." [4] This concern underscores the significance of the quote above.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/technology/shoggoth-meme-ai.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_King
[Written with ChatGPT]
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment