ccf@sri-unix (12/16/82)
Kant and AI No doubt you missed the recent despair in btl.suicide about Kant's artificial intelligence treatise, over which there had been so much hope and excitement (especially in the TRB Project). To make a long story short, somebody misread "Kunft" as "Kunst", as (God knows!) is so easy to do with old German type, and the treatise is apparently just another essay about the projected role of Reason in the future. This also clears up several passages linking rights and autonomy which had been puzzling everybody (as you mentioned), the autonomy being simply the source of freedom in Kant's ideal community. Sadly, even close study of the offending word by the image processing people is not turning up much more beyond the customary craters and lava flows. That issue aside, your epistemology sucks. There is no absurd to transcend: as the German Nietzsche said, it would be absurd to refute. The so-called Absurd in Camus serves the same function as putty, docile idiocy about an invisible kingdom. That is the way French intellectuals affect brilliance in the absence of oppression. As for Kierkegaard, aside from a certain amount of useful work on the "exclusive or" in 1843, which did not, by the way, keep him from falling into confusion over the story of Isaac, fagh! With intelligence, he has essentially nothing to do. The problem of artificial intelligence is not the absurd, but that time goes up and down whereas machines go back and forth. We face not a teleological suspension of the ethical, but a teleological suspension of the directional. What program you remove from the disk is up to you. You could remove them all. That is what freedom means. What you can't do is put them back. /s/ *<--- Chuck --->* cbosgd!ccf BTL Columbus