AI agent
Francoise Herrmann (fherrmann who-is-at igc.apc.org)
Wed, 20 May 1998 09:07:22 -0700 (PDT)
Hi everyone, To me there is a really sad transformation of desire
at the root of the quest to build a homo-computer. That such a
quest ever existed may be a question of getting grant money (!)
but it certainly makes a lot of sense when all the assumptions
about language and what it means to be humna are taken into
account. Never mind that it could not work, the illusion worked
terrifically because here was for the first time a machine that
could manipulate the symbolic system. Using language, however
constrained and artificial was a potent reduction of humaness.
That this was a disembodied creation was sadly irrelevant.
As for the lines of the AT triangle linking
subject-artifact/norms-object, these are fine, but need to be
thickened, complexified and densified as we are doing to explain
them. They are lines that need to be spoken.
Francoise Francoise Herrmann fherrmann who-is-at igc.apc.org
http://www.wenet.net/~herrmann
PS. And with respects to dealing with people as computers and computers
as people, perhaps that this is again sadly so, but it certainly does
not preclude the differences between them, non-fuzzy boundaries.