Re: the command line is language

Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> writes:

Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> writes:

[...]

 If you're thinking, you're using language....Anyway, this lack of
intellectual abilities, which boils down to language, grammar skills
has crept up even in the computer science graduate group, which is
appalling.

>
The other side of the coin is people with the skill (or learned,
calculated ability) to persuade millions of others to do stupid stuff
using semantically vacuous language.  Now (YADATROT) you can devise
by trial and error algorithms or neural net constructs  to do it for
you.
>
Thirty years ago, I made jokes about "epistemogical engineering".  Now
epistemological engineering has probably doomed the world's most
powerful nation to chaos.

*Very* well observed.  My intuition for these text generators is that
they will be pretty good for education in general precisely because they
equate the average educated person.  It will finally make the crisis
pretty obvious to the average educated person.  In other words, if all
you can do is produce trivial expressions by permutating or rearranging
the typical expression given to you by mainstream media, then you can
now be easily replaced by a machine.

For many years already, people talk about the concern with technology
replacing the human hand in the labor market.  ``Machines will replace
humans.''  Machines have already replaced humans a long time ago; the
reason you still find humans in manual labor is merely because humans
are still the cheapest machines around.  When the robot becomes cheaper,
humans will need to find new means of survival.

But let me clarify the previous paragraph.  (I often say I'm obsessed
with clarity, though I don't mean it seriously.)  I'm being a little
charming above by implying that even if you keep human beings at work,
the fact is that we've been treated like machines for a very, very long
time already.  Sarcastically speaking, it would be better protection for
us to talk about how to get rights and guarantees for machines (equating
ourselves with them) than to see us in competition against them.

Non-sarcastically speaking now, what we should concern ourselves with is
how to live a dignifying life, an objective that seems impossible to
achieve by any method whatsoever: it is precisely by confining life in
methods (as if we were scientific problems to be solved) that we become
indistinguishable from machines.  Methods are useful to solve equations,
but they will not quite help us in *living* in its deep sense.

I apologize for not defining ``dignifying life'': it would take a
master's thesis.  The meaning I put in the expression goes beyond the
already wide sense used by experts in constitucional law.  For instance,
in my master's thesis, there would be a major theorem stating that human
beings are not subjects to which a /function/ can be attributed.  The
result would be painstakingly built from first principles, Thomas
Hobbes-style.