A really nice piece. You have a nice reflective interpretive methodology. The historical text becomes a mirror, shining light on contemporary trends and controversies.
I find the part in Eliot where the mechanical and biological meld together to be quite fascinating.
Such intersections are terrifying, unbounded places in so many fictional pieces.
I remember reading a piece about Terminator 2, and the author characterized the liquid skin of the Terminator as the materialization of the postmodernist crisis of truth and identity.
Will these new AI systems lead to new kinds of representations of these intersections between human and machine?
I am reading Sean Michaels's Do You Remember Being Born?
Inside the realist genre, AI becomes quite tame -- becomes a potent metaphor for other things.
There's some really good stuff on Samuel Butler, Alfred Marshall, and of course George Eliot as it relates to conceptions of machine intelligence and evolution.
Funny you mention Terminator 2. The liberal use of the term 'neural network' always stuck with me – I'd love to do a piece about how its biological meaning got entangled with the technology of AI! When and how did 'neural network' start primarily referring to ML models and not the human brain would be a fun question to answer.
Great post, Harry. I wish I’d found it sooner! The George Eliot Archive (GeorgeEliotArchive.org) completed AI chapter summaries of all of Eliot’s works (allowing the model to focus only on the original texts), including the chapter you mention. <https://georgeeliotarchive.org/ai_analysis> I hope you don’t mind if I share it for others who may want to learn more about the brilliant George Eliot. Also, for those who mat want to word search her texts or visualize them, here’s our Text Explorer tool: https://georgeeliotarchive.org/textexplorer
We’d love it if you’d visit our project and offer comments, suggestions, or potentially a review? —Sincerely, Beverley Park Rilett
The George Eliot Archive looks like a fantastic resource. Will definitely be spending some time there. If you have anything specific I can help with, you can email me at hswlaw@protonmail.com!
> Theophrastus disagrees, arguing that machines could “be made to carry…conditions of self-supply, self-repair, and self-reproduction” to render the human race obsolete. This idea is essentially an early precursor to the intelligence explosion
It lacks the element of improvement. I'd say it's more like the old idea of a nanobot explosion.
A really nice piece. You have a nice reflective interpretive methodology. The historical text becomes a mirror, shining light on contemporary trends and controversies.
I find the part in Eliot where the mechanical and biological meld together to be quite fascinating.
Such intersections are terrifying, unbounded places in so many fictional pieces.
I remember reading a piece about Terminator 2, and the author characterized the liquid skin of the Terminator as the materialization of the postmodernist crisis of truth and identity.
Will these new AI systems lead to new kinds of representations of these intersections between human and machine?
I am reading Sean Michaels's Do You Remember Being Born?
Inside the realist genre, AI becomes quite tame -- becomes a potent metaphor for other things.
Cheers Nick! I would recommend part 3 of this resource if you're interested in this period and some of the (quite similar) thinking that was happening: https://www.tim-taylor.com/selfrepbook/web/chapter-3.html#sct-eliot
There's some really good stuff on Samuel Butler, Alfred Marshall, and of course George Eliot as it relates to conceptions of machine intelligence and evolution.
Funny you mention Terminator 2. The liberal use of the term 'neural network' always stuck with me – I'd love to do a piece about how its biological meaning got entangled with the technology of AI! When and how did 'neural network' start primarily referring to ML models and not the human brain would be a fun question to answer.
Great post, Harry. I wish I’d found it sooner! The George Eliot Archive (GeorgeEliotArchive.org) completed AI chapter summaries of all of Eliot’s works (allowing the model to focus only on the original texts), including the chapter you mention. <https://georgeeliotarchive.org/ai_analysis> I hope you don’t mind if I share it for others who may want to learn more about the brilliant George Eliot. Also, for those who mat want to word search her texts or visualize them, here’s our Text Explorer tool: https://georgeeliotarchive.org/textexplorer
We’d love it if you’d visit our project and offer comments, suggestions, or potentially a review? —Sincerely, Beverley Park Rilett
Thanks Bev! Here's a recent follow up that's more about the context behind Impressions, which you might be interested in: https://www.learningfromexamples.com/p/the-coming-race.
The George Eliot Archive looks like a fantastic resource. Will definitely be spending some time there. If you have anything specific I can help with, you can email me at hswlaw@protonmail.com!
> Theophrastus disagrees, arguing that machines could “be made to carry…conditions of self-supply, self-repair, and self-reproduction” to render the human race obsolete. This idea is essentially an early precursor to the intelligence explosion
It lacks the element of improvement. I'd say it's more like the old idea of a nanobot explosion.