Collins H. Artifictional Intelligence: Against Humanity's Surrender to Computers

Polity Press, 2018. — 232 p. — ISBN: 1509504117.Recent startling successes in machine intelligence using a technique called ‘deep learning’ seem to blur the line between human and machine as never before. Are computers on the cusp of becoming so intelligent that they will render humans obsolete? Harry Collins argues we are getting ahead of ourselves, caught up in images of a fantastical future dreamt up in fictional portrayals. The greater present danger is that we lose sight of the very real limitations of artificial intelligence and readily enslave ourselves to stupid computers: the ‘Surrender’.
By dissecting the intricacies of language use and meaning, Collins shows how far we have to go before we cannot distinguish between the social understanding of humans and computers. When the stakes are so high, we need to set the bar higher: to rethink ‘intelligence’ and recognize its inherent social basis. Only if machine learning succeeds on this count can we congratulate ourselves on having produced artificial intelligence.Computers in Social Life and the Danger of the Surrender
Language, intelligence and embedding in society
Two principles of AI: rules, patterns and precedents
Artifictional intelligence
Expertise and Writing about AI: Some Reflections on the Project
What do I mean by ‘cannot’?
Expertises and academics
Artificial intelligence belief
AI expertise
The future and points of principle
Language and ‘Repair’
How misspellings and the like are dealt with by humans
The centrality of language
Getting language into computers and the Chinese Room
Have the problems been solved?
The Turing Test and its complexities
Humans, Social Contexts and Bodies
How do humans come to understand context?
The problem of a non-embedded sociology
The Imitation Game and interactional expertise
Mimeomorphic and polimorphic actions
The body and artificial intelligence
Six Levels of Artificial Intelligence
Level I of artificial intelligence: Engineered intelligence
Level II of artificial intelligence: Asymmetrical prostheses
Level III of artificial intelligence: Symmetrical culture-consumers
Level IV of artificial intelligence: Humanity-challenging culture-consumers
Level V of artificial intelligence: Autonomous human-like societies
Level VI of artificial intelligence: Autonomous alien societies
Concluding remarks
Deep Learning: Precedent-Based, Pattern-Recognizing Computers
Extended Moore’s Law
Neural nets and their successors
Pattern recognition: Bottom-up, top-down and the sociology of knowledge
Elements of pattern recognition
More on bottom-up and top-down
Kurzweil’s Brain and the Sociology of Knowledge
How Humans Learn What Computers Can’t
A human learns from human culture
Interim conclusion: What this study of human interaction means for AI
The stubborn but strangely overlooked problem of AI
Small groups, trust and the body
Two Models of Artificial Intelligence and the Way Forward
The body revisited
The internet and human culture formation
The new artificial intelligence and a new relationship
The Editing Test and Other New Versions of the Turing Test
The editing test and its advantages
Appendixes
How the Internet Works Today
Little Dogs