Against Compression

Nicholas Carr on “AGI”:

what AGI really stands for [is] artificial generalizing intelligence. It encompasses the mind’s analytic ability to see common patterns in different things or phenomena and to derive general categories or rules from them. But it excludes all the aspects of intelligence that free us from the constraints of rules and patterns: imaginative thinking, metaphorical thinking, critical thinking, contemplation, aesthetic perception,

If you can’t actually make something intelligent, just change the definition of the word:

They reduce intelligence to that which their machines can do and then claim their machines are intelligent.

And this “intelligence” is not personal. It’s corporate:

the problem of automated abstracting came to be solved not with elegant theories of cognition and language but with the brute-force application of quantities of data and computer power

The personal computer is being surpassed by the cloud computer. What computers can do for humans will no longer be an individual issue but a corporate one. Whoever owns the most compute, owns the most customers.

It’s like shovels aren’t important anymore. Only backhoes and dynamite.

[we] adopted computer systems as the fundamental conduit of thought and culture…Those who control the systems control much about us. Their flaws and shortcomings are built not just into the technology but, increasingly, into society’s norms and practices. Just as the brilliant but socially maladroit Mark Zuckerberg came to set the terms for how we socialize today, so the brilliant but intellectually crippled designers of contemporary AI systems seem destined to set the terms for how we think.