meant to send this to the list but sent it to Marshall only.
-- michael rees effective immediately suite Number 301 www.michaelrees.com 1015 Washington Ave 314 494 7393 St. Louis Mo 63101 msr@michaelrees.com
attached mail follows:
Marshall Burns wrote:
>
> Come on, Michael! If you define "automatic" so that it includes human labor,
> the word just loses all meaning.
>
> However, I agree with your first point, that none of the machines is yet
> fully automatic. It does require some discretion to decide where to draw the
> line between what is manual and what is automatic. I'm willing to call an
> SLA and an LOM automatic even though they require a good deal of manual
> post-processing. That is partly a function of our primitive state of
> technology; ten years from now, an SLA and LOM will not be considered
> automatic, but dismally laborious. However, even today, I do NOT consider
> pottery or manual stacking of digitally cut patterns (including the JP5,
> with apologies to my friend Charles Thomas, who knows my views on this) to
> be automatic.
>
> Best regards,
> Marshall Burns
>
and yet some aspect of it is automatic--the cutting. A matter of degree,
perhaps?
I don't think that defining automatic the way I have makes the word lose
meaning. For example, in the 20's and 30's surrealists engaged in
something called "automatic writing". They would attempt to suspend any
rational judgements and let the words spill out as they would. This also
came to be known as stream of consciousness, which ofcourse was used by
Joyce in Ulyses which many people feel embodies the "essence" of
modernism.
Though the two examples I've given are more poetic and seemingly less
practical, stream of consciousness and automatic thinking have some
pragmatic application in the solution of technical and real world
problems. It is one of the ways that "creativity" works.
It would seem to me that artificial intelligence would have to engage
this kind of "automatic" thinking for it to supplant human thinking.
It is always important for me to examine all around the edges of a
thing. I don't think this is a pedantic excercise.
For a machine to be fully automatic would imply that it is intelligent,
even if artificially intelligent. It would be able to grow and learn
from local case scenarios or experiences. In that regard the machine
looks more like a human than a a machine as we understand them today-set
up by a human to do repetive tasks. In that sense, a human is either
supplanted by the added artifical intelligence or also has the potential
to be automatic in the same way that machines are. I know I'm thinking
way out on the edges, but this stuff interests me. I am quite engaged by
many people's contention that robots will replace us. The replicator or
fabricator is the first step towards this, and yet...
It would be interesting to me to know some of your thoughts about ai and
robotics.
best,
-- michael rees effective immediately suite Number 301 www.michaelrees.com 1015 Washington Ave 314 494 7393 St. Louis Mo 63101 msr@michaelrees.comFor more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
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