If that opening hasn't put
you off reading further, then welcome to this short intellectual coffee-break!
How we use words is
important. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
(Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations 1953) You can trace the evolution of ascribing mechanisms
with human characteristics back through history to certain philosophical
movements. Personally, I blame the mathematicians and logicians, those fearful
meddlers and “Gradgrinds” of history, for this dichotomous mess we find
ourselves in. I suppose there is a certain mentality in humanity that would
like to assume that people’s behaviour and the machines we build are synonymous.
If only we were all perfectly logical. These days we have a habit of talking
about inanimate and stupid objects as if they are sentient beings. Regularly
you will come across irate people standing over a machine with a mixture of
frustration and animosity because the bloody thing is not doing what it should
and won’t act within reason - like say humans would. To be clear: Computers do
not have “memory” that is in any sense similar to human memory, they are not
intelligent and the notion of Artificial Intelligence is just that, a notion,
that many argue will never be a reality.
If you haven’t already been
told yet, you live in a world that is sometimes called the Information Age and
this nonsensical nomenclature has its roots stretching back to Claude Shannon, and
his influential paper: A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948). Since
then we have allowed the idea of information to be understood in terms of electrical
blips and signal transmission, which is a branch of engineering and applied mathematics.
It is important to remind ourselves that Shannon paper is entitled: “A
Mathematical Theory of Communication” and was principally a paper on compressing
data operations and reliably storing and communicating data. He explicitly
states that: “Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or
are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual
entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the
engineering problem.” He doesn’t care what “meaning” the messages or
transmissions have. (Nor, by the way, does Google care about meaning.)
Everything is simply algorithmic!
