God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

It turns out that computers are particularly adept at the tasks that we humans find most difficult: crunching equations, solving logical propositions, and other modes of abstract thought. What artificial intelligence finds most difficult are the sensory perceptive tasks and motor skills that we perform unconsciously: walking, drinking from a cup, s

It turns out that computers are particularly adept at the tasks that we humans find most difficult: crunching equations, solving logical propositions, and other modes of abstract thought. What artificial intelligence finds most difficult are the sensory perceptive tasks and motor skills that we perform unconsciously: walking, drinking from a cup, s

His conclusion is echoed by the writer James Bridle, who has declared the era of cloud computing “the New Dark Age,” a regress to a time when knowledge could be obtained only through revelation, without true understanding.

“Who knows why people do what they do?” he wrote. “The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity.”

It is impossible, as an MIT study on human behavior models points out, to determine “the internal states of the human,” so the predictions must rely on “an indirect estimation process,” looking at the various external states that can be measured and quantified. Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism is often misidentified as a form of totalitar

“When it comes to understanding how things are,” he writes, “the machines may be closer to the truth than we humans ever could be.”

Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?

What we are abdicating, in the end, is our duty to create meaning from our empirical observations—to define for ourselves what constitutes justice, and morality, and quality of life—a task we forfeit each time we forget that meaning is an implicitly human category that cannot be reduced to quantification. To forget this truth is to use our tools to

precisely my confusion about the relationship between foresight and freedom: To what extent does the act of prediction enact the very fate it foresees?