Cogito Ergo Sum, I Think...

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Still feeling a tad jaded and disoriented after our return from the short break in Shropshire last week; yesterday was a long day, and I started today after one of those fevered returns to sleep early this morning which evinced a dream from which I still haven't quite escaped the clutches. However, I opened this week's New Statesman just now to a review of Sebastian Mallaby's recently published book "The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, Deepmind, and the Quest for Superintelligence" [Allen Lane, 480pp £30.00]; and interesting reading it makes, too. Asked by Mallaby if he thinks AI will 'be a bigger change than the Industrial Revolution', Hassabis likens AI more to that most radical human evocation of self and the realisation of such; the making of handprints on a cave wall, tens of thousands of years ago: the very first externalisation of our inner selves; the genesis of human culture and civilisation embodied in an abstraction of self in communication with an unknown audience, projecting that 'self' onto the world for others to interact with. The key is the 'unknown audience'. The ability to abstract and transmit our sense of self to third parties as yet unknown to us is the prime factor in what marks us out as 'sentient' in our agreed scheme of thought.

That we operate as such is still philosophically moot, at least in terms of human thought and philosophy: the arguments over mankind's 'sensibility' have raged or rather waffled on for centuries: there is a fine and undifferentiated line between simple action/reaction, and intellectual 'motivity': the existence of our 'inner world' of thought, remains unresolved in any real sense: hence faith, religion and the meta-activity of philosophy itself; all of which are themselves creations of the human mind. The circularity of this is in itself curious, at least to the mind of that being at the centre of that circle. The question remains: what, if anything, marks our species out in the mindfulness stakes as unique? Therein lies the conundrum of the status of 'artificial' intelligence. At what point does artificial become actual? Is this merely a philosophical nicety - again, philosophy is an abstraction of the world by the human mind itself - where is the tipping-point between 'brick' and intelligence? Chew on that one for a while, mes amis!

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