Tobias Rees at Noema:
Tobias Rees, founder of an AI studio located at the intersection of philosophy, art and technology, sat down with Noema Editor-in-Chief Nathan Gardels to discuss the philosophical significance of generative AI.
Nathan Gardels: What remains unclear to us humans is the nature of machine intelligence we have created through AI and how it changes our own understanding of ourselves. What is your perspective as a philosopher who has contemplated this issue not from within the Ivory Tower, but “in the wild,” in the engineering labs at Google and elsewhere?
Tobias Rees: AI profoundly challenges how we have understood ourselves.
Why do I think so?
We humans live by a large number of conceptual presuppositions. We may not always be aware of them — and yet they are there and shape how we think and understand ourselves and the world around us. Collectively, they are the logical grid or architecture that underlies our lives.
What makes AI such a profound philosophical event is that it defies many of the most fundamental, most taken-for-granted concepts — or philosophies — that have defined the modern period and that most humans still mostly live by. It literally renders them insufficient, thereby marking a deep caesura.
Let me give a concrete example.
More here.
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