On the Stupidity of Artificial Intelligence

A Rising Tide Foundation lecture

As many of you receiving this email are aware, I co-host regular Sunday science/history lectures with the Rising Tide Foundation alongside my wife Cynthia Chung (who just began her own Substack account which I’d highly encourage you sign up to).

During one of the most recent lectures, Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum delivered a history of Artificial Intelligence from the 19th century to the present as the following questions were posed:

1) Is it truly possible to replicate the full spectrum of human mentation with “machine learning” as is popularly presumed today?

2) What are the positive roles for computer learning, and also what are the profound failures of A.I. to deal with certain fundamental qualities of language and mental activity more generally with a focus on paradox formation, metaphor and irony?

3) Why is Artificial Intelligence only plausible to the degree that people are trained to artificially think like machines via purely symbolic deductive/inductive forms of logic?

4) What is it about the human mind that absolutely distinguishes our species from all possible forms of machines on the one side and monkeys on the other?

These questions and more will be addressed by Dr. Jonathan Tennenbaum in the following lecture.

If you would like to join in future lectures, or weekly readings with the Rising Tide Foundation over zoom, simply email risingtidefoundation@gmail.com

To access all past lectures, simply click here.