Status Updates From God, Human, Animal, Machine...

Amazon, in 2018, filed a patent for “anticipatory shipping,” presuming that it will eventually be able to predict what customers are going to buy before they actually do so.

“Contrary to what we like to believe today, humans quite easily fall into obeying others, and any sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from God. People won’t necessarily mind taking their marching orders from some vast oracular computer.”

In addition to our physical bodies, there exists—somewhere in the ether—a second self that is purely informational and immaterial, a data set of our clicks, purchases, and likes that lingers not in some transcendent nirvana but rather in the shadowy dossiers of third-party aggregators... (cont)

“‘Understanding’, like meaning, is an anthropocentric concept—one that information technologies were deliberately built to elide. In a way Anderson’s piece underscored the extent to which the technical logic has seeped into the real world we inhabit, such that even when information is decoded & given to us as output, we cannot always make sense of it or understand how the machine reached its conclusion.”

“It’s not merely that computers can transcend us in sheer brain power—solving theorems faster than we can, finding solutions more efficiently—but that they can actually understand the world in a way that we cannot. [Arendt] found this proposition especially alarming.”

The true trauma of disenchantment is that the world, as seen through the lens of modern science, is devoid of intrinsic meaning… [The human mind] is driven, as Weber put it, by ‘an inner compulsion to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take up a position towards it.’