Dark Intelligence

Issue

Questions about contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) — regardless the iteration, current and envisaged, including a postulated “singularity” — are not principally about the technology. They are principally about the essential meaning of human intelligence and, more deeply, the total human person. They imply a forgottenness, perhaps even an abandonment, of the primordial meaning of “to be” that risks steering efforts to develop AI systems onto less than optimal trajectories.

Response

This 5-hour workshop lays out the case to supersede the “artificial intelligence” sobriquet with “dark intelligence” to offset presuppositions belying the technology and coinciding with a forgottenness of being (Seinsvergessenheit). A phenomenological perspective is enacted. The project (a) reduces AI to its fundamental statistical processes, including the possibility of a “singularity” allowed by the statistical formulation of entropy (S = k ln W), (b) exhibits the factical meaning of human intelligence and its correspondence to the pre-thematic comprehension of being (“is”) (Seinsverständnis), (c) underscores the categorical differences between human intelligence and AI, and (d) presents the case to replace the AI moniker to overcome misconceptions about the technology and clarify the way it is thought.