From: smirzo@example.com   
      
   Mike Spencer  writes:   
      
   > Salvador Mirzo  writes:   
      
   [...]   
      
   >>  If you're thinking, you're using language....Anyway, this lack of   
   >> intellectual abilities, which boils down to language, grammar skills   
   >> has crept up even in the computer science graduate group, which is   
   >> appalling.   
   >   
   > The other side of the coin is people with the skill (or learned,   
   > calculated ability) to persuade millions of others to do stupid stuff   
   > using semantically vacuous language.  Now (YADATROT) you can devise   
   > by trial and error algorithms or neural net constructs  to do it for   
   > you.   
   >   
   > Thirty years ago, I made jokes about "epistemogical engineering".  Now   
   > epistemological engineering has probably doomed the world's most   
   > powerful nation to chaos.   
      
   *Very* well observed.  My intuition for these text generators is that   
   they will be pretty good for education in general precisely because they   
   equate the average educated person.  It will finally make the crisis   
   pretty obvious to the average educated person.  In other words, if all   
   you can do is produce trivial expressions by permutating or rearranging   
   the typical expression given to you by mainstream media, then you can   
   now be easily replaced by a machine.   
      
   For many years already, people talk about the concern with technology   
   replacing the human hand in the labor market.  ``Machines will replace   
   humans.''  Machines have already replaced humans a long time ago; the   
   reason you still find humans in manual labor is merely because humans   
   are still the cheapest machines around.  When the robot becomes cheaper,   
   humans will need to find new means of survival.   
      
   But let me clarify the previous paragraph.  (I often say I'm obsessed   
   with clarity, though I don't mean it seriously.)  I'm being a little   
   charming above by implying that even if you keep human beings at work,   
   the fact is that we've been treated like machines for a very, very long   
   time already.  Sarcastically speaking, it would be better protection for   
   us to talk about how to get rights and guarantees for machines (equating   
   ourselves with them) than to see us in competition against them.   
      
   Non-sarcastically speaking now, what we should concern ourselves with is   
   how to live a dignifying life, an objective that seems impossible to   
   achieve by any method whatsoever: it is precisely by confining life in   
   methods (as if we were scientific problems to be solved) that we become   
   indistinguishable from machines.  Methods are useful to solve equations,   
   but they will not quite help us in *living* in its deep sense.   
      
   I apologize for not defining ``dignifying life'': it would take a   
   master's thesis.  The meaning I put in the expression goes beyond the   
   already wide sense used by experts in constitucional law.  For instance,   
   in my master's thesis, there would be a major theorem stating that human   
   beings are not subjects to which a /function/ can be attributed.  The   
   result would be painstakingly built from first principles, Thomas   
   Hobbes-style.   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)