Don't Trust the Promise of Artificial Intelligence

Before we create a new intelligence in our image, we have to reconsider the fundamental lie that enables human civilization: that nature and culture are separate and distinct, rather than neighbors on the same continuum. At 1:17:00 in the video I refer to a Bruno Latour quote which I think is fundamental to this debate. The full quote is this: "Instead of two powers, one hidden and indisputable (nature), and the other disputable and despised (politics), we will have two different tasks in the same collective. The first task will be to answer the question: How many humans and nonhumans are to be taken into account? The second will be to answer the most difficult of all questions: Are you ready, and at the price of what sacrifice, to live the good life together? That this highest of political and moral questions could have been raised, for so many centuries, by so many bright minds, for humans only without the nonhumans that make them up, will soon appear, I have no doubt, as extravagant as when the Founding Fathers denied slaves and women the vote...There is a future, and it does differ from the past. But where once it was a matter of hundreds and thousands, now millions and billions have to be accommodated--billions of people, of course, but also billions of animals, stars, prions, cows, robots, chips, and bytes... That there was a decade when people could believe that history had drawn to a close simply because an ethnocentric--or better yet, epistemocentric--conception of progress had drawn a closing parenthesis will appear as the greatest and let us hope last outburst of an exotic cult of modernity that has never been short on arrogance."