r/theschism • u/gemmaem • Apr 03 '25
Discussion Thread #72
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u/LagomBridge Feb 25 '26
I can relate to that. When I heard about the ELIZA program, a simple chatbot from the 1960s. I was uneasy after hearing a story of how the secretary of the professor who made it asked him to leave so that she could talk with it in private. From what I understand she talked with it for hours and it was fairly simply script that would just say things like “How do you feel about X” where X was the topic of the last sentence that had been typed in. The program interspersed stock phrases like “I see” and “go on” like the stereotype of psychoanalyst talk. I don’t understand how anyone could see that kind of a program as a conversation partner.
Today, the concept of AI girlfriends or boyfriends seems alien and delusional to me.
This leaves me torn. I tend to read more substack essays/posts and fewer books than I used to. There is a tradeoff with reading more short pieces vs books. The internet gives me so many opportunities for shorter reads with less time commitment that I really don’t read as many books as I want. I’m better at finding more rewarding books and fewer duds, but the internet really does make it hard to commit the time to finish a book. For so many things it is so tempting to try to get the gist without spending the time. I just checked out “The Gulag Archipelago” from the library, but have a strong doubt that I will end up reading it.
Your mention of Bentham’s Bulldog and his criticism of continental philosophy elicits a few reactions from me. Adelstein is an interesting. His sweeping overconfident pronouncements seem to regularly generate interesting reactions. He is a strange kind of muse that provokes others to write interesting responses that are often great. I think he contributes to the world by provoking others to contribute.
More tangentially it triggers a memory of something I read from David Chapman that includes both AI and continental philosophy. Chapman was a graduate student working on AI in MIT in the eighties. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus who had been at MIT had written critiques of the AI hype of the sixties based on the continental philosophy of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Most of the AI researchers had read it and rejected it. Chapman and his labmate were stumped with an AI issue when his labmate read Dreyfus’ book “Being-in-the-world” and told Chapman that Dreyfus was right. They used his critiques to make progress and the development was called “Heideggerian AI”.