The World of Wolfram, And a Luddite's Response
Our minds are just like the clouds.
They both calculate.
They just computate.
They input data.
They output data.
In-between, just a machine.
Just machine after machine.
Data and data.
Nature: mere machine.
What bad poetry!
What a bad story!
A stillborn mythology....
Impoverished humanity.
But those who control it,
Tell us that is the world
That we inhabit.
More comfort than ever...
Protected from weather...
Better health...
More wealth...
A zero sum gain:
Much more pleasure,
And less pain.
What humanity?
What reality?
What vanity!
What sterility!
Give me poetry!
Or insanity?
It's life I desire...
Throw the machines
Into the fire.
Inspired by:
"What does the human brain do? A brain receives certain input, it computes things, it causes certain actions to happen, it generates a certain output. Like the weather. All sorts of systems are, effectively, doing computations--whether it's a brain or, say, a cloud responding to its thermal environment.
We can argue that our brains are doing vastly more sophisticated computations than those in the atmosphere. But it turns out that there's a broad equivalence between the kinds of computations that different kinds of systems do. This renders the question of the human condition somewhat poignant, because it seems we're not as special as we thought. There are all those different systems of nature that are pretty much equivalent, in terms of their computational capabilities."
-- Stephen Wolfram from his essay Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Civilization in the book Possible Minds
