Antonio Iacono <antiac@gmail.com> writes:

https://nooscope.ai/

«This diagram manifesto is another way to say that AI, the king of computation [...] is naked.» Ooooooh, che spettacolo! --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- [...] The purpose of the Nooscope map is to secularize AI from the ideological status of ‘intelligent machine’ to one of knowledge instrument. Rather than evoking legends of alien cognition, it is more reasonable to consider machine learning as an instrument of knowledge magnification that helps to perceive features, patterns, and correlations through vast spaces of data beyond human reach. In the history of science and technology, this is no news: it has already been pursued by optical instruments throughout the histories of astronomy and medicine.3 In the tradition of science, machine learning is just a Nooscope, an instrument to see and navigate the space of knowledge (from the Greek skopein ‘to examine, look’ and noos ‘knowledge’). Borrowing the idea from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the Nooscope diagram applies the analogy of optical media to the structure of all machine learning apparatuses. Discussing the power of his calculus ratiocinator and ‘characteristic numbers’ (the idea to design a numerical universal language to codify and solve all the problems of human reasoning), Leibniz made an analogy with instruments of visual magnification such as the microscope and telescope. He wrote: ‘Once the characteristic numbers are established for most concepts, mankind will then possess a new instrument which will enhance the capabilities of the mind to a far greater extent than optical instruments strengthen the eyes, and will supersede the microscope and telescope to the same extent that reason is superior to eyesight.’4 Although the purpose of this text is not to reiterate the opposition between quantitative and qualitative cultures, Leibniz’s credo need not be followed. Controversies cannot be conclusively computed. Machine learning is not the ultimate form of intelligence. [...] This is generally known as the debate on bias in AI, but the political implications of the logical form of machine learning are deeper. Machine learning is not bringing a new dark age but one of diffracted rationality, in which, as it will be shown, an episteme of causation is replaced by one of automated correlations. More in general, AI is a new regime of truth, scientific proof, social normativity and rationality, which often does take the shape of a statistical hallucination. [...] --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- Grazie! Giovanni. -- Giovanni Biscuolo