When the abacus becomes an instrument of prediction we have moved into artificial intelligence.
A great sentence that needs to be unpacked.
A computer was generally seen as a machine faster than a human at processing numbers and objects. To go beyond mere numbers, to predict beyond reasoned extrapolations, you generally stepped outside the abacus of calculations and found a prophet, soothsayer or mystic who dealt in wonder.
Worked for millennia. After the human and the machine could no longer see further than the computation they had completed then wonder followed. The prophet was revered – especially if they were right all the time! They had a special connection to the unseen, the supernatural, the divine.
In some ways the current generation (and a few before) have moved firmly into a scientistic mindset. All understanding is expected to be evidence based. Rule out/erase the idea that knowledge and wisdom are separate from each other. When you have accumulated enough information you should be able to project accurate results thus generating wisdom to be disseminated to those around you.
This mindset promotes Artificial Intelligence as understood in a Western Mindset. Thus the oft heard statement that AI is “of the devil” or “evil”. When revelation is eliminated, wonder is lost. This heads onto another path I won’t follow today – into a philosophical discussion of the modern mindset, the post-modern mindset and now the ambivalent (or “paradoxical”) mindset. A spoiler alert – you might just find that our point in time isn’t the first time this cycle has happened.
But does that make AI evil?