Saturday, October 02, 2021
AI non-pointmissing from 1954
The Bitsavers archive includes some old magazines like ACM.
In April 1954, Elliott Gruenberg wrote about thinking, creativity, and artificial intelligence. Page 6 of the PDF.
He got EVERYTHING right.
At that point digital was struggling to compete with analog. 1/3 of the material in the magazine was about new uses of analog computers, or analog controlled and recorded by digital. After digital defeated analog, we lost our ability to think properly about thinking and creativity. All of our metaphors are based on discrete time segments and discrete instructions, with NO FEEDBACK. From this mindset we can't begin to understand how life works. Gruenberg did understand how life works. Or rather he understood THAT life works. Living things are primarily meant to make, not think.
Human personality is characterized by a drive to preserve a self or ego; by an awareness of self, as related to a world; by an urge to survive. In addition, there is a capacity to plan action, to talk about it, to himself and others, and thus to reason. But beyond this, the human being has feeling, emotions. Activities make him feel good or bad. Certain sights also give rise to such feelings, and certain sounds. There is a feeling of good health hard to describe. A human being has a positive feeling when he has created something: a new book; a musical composition, a report, a new machine, a new room for the house. The struggle of creation may not be pleasant, but the results, if well done, give rise to happy emotions.I see only one point where recent knowledge has gone beyond what Gruenberg knew in 1954:
Most anti-mechanists emphasize the importance of creativeness as a distinguishing mark of human personality. But before we get carried away with the uniqueness of human personality, let us examine creativity a little more closely. Mothers who bear babies feel a sense of creative power, and justifiably so. Yet, in what sense does a mother create her child? Her control over the process once it starts is no better than the control of an attendant monitoring the gauges in a chemical plant.Epigenetics now shows that the emotions and actions of mothers create lasting changes in the baby. Grandma's "superstitions" were right. The anti-mechanists are right.
Labels: Not AI point-missing, skill-estate
¶ 9:05 AM
