Let's not ignore the Loxodonta in the room

 

When researching the leaders, CEOs and pioneers / advocates of AI there's something that should not be ignored. That is the number of them that hold, how should I say, fringe views. They may have Transhumanism tendencies, often outright support for this 'potential of augmenting humans with technology. It may be they have a faith in nanotechnologies to wire technologies directly into the human cortex. Or hold both views in the case of Ray Kurzweil as revealed in his interview with Fridman. I first came across the idea of Transhumanism after visiting a self proclaimed Transhumanist artist back in the late 1980's. I was, frankly horrified with the hubris of it all. 

These are far from the only views commonly held by what I call tech-evangelists who always, always anthropomorphise technologies, which somewhat gives the game away.

Another common idea is that the AI 'singularity', a term borrowed from physics, is inevitable, the singularity in this usage is the concept that superintelligence is the event horizon that we can't peer beyond, when according to some, we will have created a superhuman or, as some call it, a 'God'. 

Today I came across an excellent blog by Johannes Jäger that dives into this murky realm and who is, thankfully, not afraid to call out the elephant in the room of the Tech-evangelists. I encourage you to have a read, especially the post 'Machine Metaphysics and the Cult of Techno-Transcendentalism'.

I'm currently in my second week of blogging about AGI, and I know, I should have expected to come across the varied view points of tech-evangelists by this point. I'm still surprised though at the prelevance and the increasingly perverse worldviews held by those that wish to 'transform our lives.'