Intelligence is not Artificial

by piero scaruffi

Why the Singularity is not Coming any Time Soon.
Life in the Coming Age of Incredibly Stupid Machines.

This is the vastly expanded 2019 edition

Check out excerpts from the chapters, this slide presentation and this 20-minute video.

ISBN 978-1984101457: click here to purchase it.

The old and much shorter 2013-2016 edition is still available from Amazon.com. That 2013-2016 edition had the ISBN number 978-0-9765531-9-9

but you can also download it for free here (PDF)

The expanded edition contains a lengthy (and frequently boring) history of Artificial Intelligence, with as many references to art, music and other sciences as i could fit in 500 pages. I demystified A.I. as much as possible: the intelligence of machines is vastly exaggerated and, in any case, i don't see what would be wrong with having truly intelligent machines if we could make them (we do have intelligent animals of all sorts, and this would just be a new form of intelligence). I am afraid, instead, that we will soon be surrounded by incredibly stupid machines, not by super-intelligent ones, and that we are increasingly be forced to behave like machines (instead of machines behaving like humans). I mainly wrote the book to talk about the philosophical, sociological and anthropological aspects of the A.I. phenomenon. The Singularity is obviously a new form of religion - nothing wrong with it, just take it for what it is - religion, not science. And what really worries me is not the intelligence of machines but the "vast algorithmic bureaucracies" that we are creating everywhere (with or without machines). A.I. is an effect, not the cause, of a pervasive restructuring of human society and daily life. And much more to argue about!

Questions?