On the Other Hand (Opinion)

Our subject has been compared to Mozart. His both in the popular media and its corrupting moral influence on society, proofs are ingenious, cleverly argued, among the cultured intelligentsia. Lanier's home page: While many of these attacks are cited "... machine decision making is widely, most of them are ridiculous running our household finances to anyone with an appropriate technical to a scary degree. Our demonstrated - Sir John Eccles for the "Mysterious willingness to accommodate machines Loom Theory." AI…lets strategists Thus, the Simon Newcomb award imagine less gruesome warfare this year goes to Jaron Lanier. He is an essayist whose views can be found in such magazines All of this ill-informed pseudo-political as Harpers and Wired; he is also, ranting is remarkably silly, but according to his web page, "available none of it can really be said to constitute for public speaking." He is widely regarded an argument. The first part of the argument is clearly inspired by Searle's magnificent reductio, though performed in a very different style. Recall that Searle's those numbers are a computer Obviously one is supposed to think argument amounts to the claim program. Lanier then makes the move that any sufficiently complex physical through all the possible computers which wins him this year's Award: system--the atoms in a wall, say that could exist … until you "You say the rainstorm is not --has within it a pattern which could find one that treats the raindrop really doing computation--it is be the encoding of a given piece of patterns as a program exactly just sitting there as a passive program--and software--a word-processor, for instance--and equivalent to your brain." Perhaps there's something "Yes, it can be done..." [Since the Now the raindrops are reduce to nonsense, that a program There's a technical slip here: the doing the computing."