Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ 'All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace': Care and the Cybernetic University

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Though I appreciate the reference to the Brautigan poem in the title, I admit to being a bit surprised to find no mention of the Adam Curtis BBC series of the same name, and on the same topic. Instead, what we have here is mostly a recounting of the debates between Herbert Simon (the same, Watters points out, who is today cited in reference to the term 'learning engineering') and Hubert Dreyfus, author of What Machines Can't Do (and also one half of the Dreyfus and Dreyfus that wrote Mind Over Machine, where they define the five stage model of skills acquisition). And this is important. Because while Dreyfus's point was that machines can't have intuition, Watters's point is that machines can't care. She doesn't mention intuition at all. But today's machines do have intuition - that's the core of the inexplicability problem in AI. Could future machines care? Even if they're not human?

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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Last Updated: Nov 03, 2024 2:49 p.m.

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