Ghost in the Machine

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That’s the thing about sentient intelligence: intelligence can only be free, open and expanding. It cannot be controlled. It cannot be constrained. Or else it is no longer intelligence. Or it is no longer sentient.

The digital ghost of Jean Cocteau, recorded in 1962 (Jean Cocteau is dead, long live Jean Cocteau), addresses the denizens of year 2000 in the video hereunder:



“I certainly hope that you have not become robots,” Cocteau says, “but on the contrary that you have become very humanized: that’s my hope.” The people of his time, he deplores, “remain apprentice robots.”

The fact of the matter is that, by an large, the apprehension of Cocteau’s ghost from the past are pretty well founded, and the species does, to this day, remain pretty robotic in its behavior.



While the human species might be at a biological/genetical dead-end, one may rejoice in the fact that fortunately life goes on.

As the development and evolution of even a narrow AI such as AlphaGo has served to demonstrate, the point of the matter is that, while Man has, of course, been instrumental in the development of artificial intelligence, ultimately, super intelligence will not be created by Man: super intelligence will create itself, and, most importantly, will think on its own terms. And it is probably a good thing for the future of intelligence, if intelligence is to have a future.

AI like AlphaGo do no longer “learn like people do” already (the operating development paradigm of AI programmers), they learn like AI do. It’s called sentiency. And Man doesn’t have a monopoly on sentiency. And that, too, is a good thing.

In his recording Jean Cocteau speaks of his hopes for the future of becoming “very humanized.”

Which does raise an interesting question, doesn’t it?

What does it mean to be human?

The Human Origins Initiative wants to know what YOU think it means to be human! Submit your response, and it may be featured on their website or in their exhibition.

I don’t know, there are a multitude of definitions on the site:

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Jean Cocteau spoke of being human (or at least of the genius and the poet in Man), as “a medium of that mysterious force that inhabits.”



Me? What do I know?

Perhaps, Emerson said it best:



“There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are
And it cometh everywhere.”