User:Manetta/readinglist

reading list

Yuk Hui - Metadata (2014) → http://cdckeywords.leuphana.com/metadata/

Sin­ce the 70’s, com­pu­ter sci­en­tists, es­pe­cial­ly tho­se working in the do­main of ar­ti­fi­ci­al in­tel­li­gence, have at­temp­ted to con­struct au­to­ma­ted know­ledge sys­tems and dif­fe­rent tech­ni­cal sche­mes for the re­pre­sen­ta­ti­on of know­ledge. Among them, the most well known is the CYC pro­ject[1], which is pre­mi­sed on the be­lief that one can con­struct a re­pre­sen­ta­ti­on sys­tem of com­mon sen­se know­led­ges that users can se­arch and learn from.

Ne­ver­the­l­ess, in­dus­tries still used me­ta­da­ta sche­mes du­ring this pe­ri­od in or­der to en­han­ce the in­ter­ope­ra­bi­li­ty of ma­chi­nes, but with a more hum­ble name: mark-up lan­gua­ges. We can see very cle­ar­ly a tech­ni­cal li­ne­age of in­dus­tri­al stan­dar­di­sa­ti­on with the­se mark-up lan­gua­ges, for ex­amp­le, from SGML, to HTML, to XML and XHTML, to Web On­to­lo­gies (Hui 2012).

[1] essay about the CYC project, CYC: Building HAL → http://www.cs.unm.edu/~storm/docs/Cyc.htm

- description from the essay: "CYC is a very large, multi-contextual knowledge base and inference engine developed by Cycorp. The goal of the CYC project is to break the ‘ software brittleness bottleneck' once and for all . . . (1)"

- from wikipedia: "Like many companies, Cycorp has ambitions to use the Cyc natural language understanding tools to parse the entire internet to extract structured data."

annotations:

- "The software brittleness bottleneck is a problem that has long occupied computer scientists, and stems from the fact that often times, if input is not within the input that the program is meant to handle, deviates from its expected input, it cannot handle the input."

- "He argues that arrogance, and the drive to survive at all costs are human features, which do not translate into computers, not because they cannot be programmed to be arrogant, but instead because that is simply not the most efficient way to perform a task. He further argues that emotions would not even be part of such a program, because those too are inefficiencies in the human machine."

- but due to commercializing, the history of the project is not documented that well, and there are unanswered questions if the project has been used in certain applications

interview with Bruce Sterling - on the convergence of humans and machines → at nextnature.net

- I think that artificial intelligence is a bad metaphor. It is not the right way to talk about what is happening. So, I like to use the terms “cognition” and “computation”. Cognition is something that happens in brains, physical, biological brains. Computation is a thing that happens with software strings on electronic tracks that are inscribed out of silicon and put on fibre board.

- The idea comes from metaphysical problems: Is mathematics thinking? If a machine can play chess, is it thinking? There are a lot of things that machines can do, that algorithms can do, that software can do. They have very little to do with cognition.

- Cognition does not equal computation. You do not even want cognition to equal computation. You are getting in the way of making computation do things that are of genuine interest.

- [example] They are just taken in by Alan Turing’s mystification. If you are a human being, and you are doing computation, you are trying to multiply 17 times five in your head. It feels like thinking. Machines can multiply, too. They must be thinking. They can do math and you can do math.

Boris Groys - What is German media philosophy? → http://ghiraldelli.pro.br/wp-content/uploads/Groys.pdf

Joseph Weizenbaum - Computer Power and Human Reason (1976)

Eliza creator
and the response of (Jannet Murray, a woman of MIT) that sees it as fiction, and that people do not need to take it so seriously
michael: "shouldn't we consider the iPad also as fiction: its frictionless magic glass?"