13 Il dotto rincoglionito dalla politica. Perché è così frequente? E perché è quasi sempre di sinistra?

Il dotto rincoglionito dalla politica. Perché è così frequente? E perché è quasi sempre di sinistra?

Left-Wing Bias: An Infantile Disorder of Contemporary Philosophy – When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics – Neven Sesardic

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Argomenti trattati: perché il mondo accademico perdona le stupidaggini (se sono “di sinistra”) – il simula e dissimula dell’accademico di destra – l’ IQ dei “fascisti” e quello dei neri – perché tanto chiasso su Frege e il silenzio sui tanti comunisti (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Badiou, Lukács, Bloch… Neurath, Russell, Wittgenstein, Lakatos, Cohen, Putnam, Davidson… – l’equivalenza tra destra e fascismo – ci vuole davvero un genio per giustificare certe pratiche ripugnante – le idiozie di Parfit: tutti i ricchi sono ladri – La raffica di idiozie di Jeremy Waldron sulla tortura – Hobbes sui dotti rincoglioniti: l’ignirante si accontenta di posizioni intermedie, il dotto più facilmente preda di radicalismi – la stupidità in politica, specie a sinistra,  è gratificante e gratuita –

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Academic philosophy, like other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, has a notoriously strong leftist tilt (see, e.g., Gross 2013, 299; Maranto et al. 2009, 16, 22).

Note:IL BIAS DOCUMENTATO

Robert Nozick Loses His Nerve

the leftist extremists would be considered by a huge majority of their colleagues (who share their basic political opinion) as being (a) correct or almost correct; or (b) perhaps too radical but still “having their heart in the right place”; or (c) profoundly wrong but nevertheless not remotely as condemnable as the right-wing extremists.

Note:L’ESTREMISTA DI SINISTRA LADDOVE LA SINISTRA DOMINA

Since one has to communicate on a daily basis with colleagues in one’s discipline and find a basic modus vivendi with one’s professional peers, it is clear that in such a situation the pressure against the minority extremism would be enormous.

Note:MASCHERARE

According to a 2013–2014 study by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, the ratio of university professors who described themselves as politically “far left” vs. those on the “far right” was between 30 to 1 and 50 to 1 (Eagan et al. 2014, 112).

Note:NUMERI

A nice illustration of the effect of ideological majority pressure in philosophy is the case of Robert Nozick. He admitted that at one point he went along with the incorrect representation of his views just because he expected it would make his colleagues view him more favorably

Note:NOZICK AMMETTE: HO FALSATO IL MIO POSIZIONAMENTO POLITICO PER QUESTIONI DI “SOPRAVVIVENZA”

Those Dumb Conservatives

Sometimes the political imbalance in academia is attributed to a putative correlation between being a conservative and having low intelligence.

Note:A DESTRA IQ PIÚ BASSO

We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.

Note:ROBERT BRANDON DIXIT

several non-philosopher commentators wondered whether Brandon would be willing to extend the same logic to another context where it would seem to apply with no less force.

Note:LA LOGICA DI BRANDON APPLICATA AI NERI: APRITI CIELO

A good illustration is the case of the philosopher Michael Levin, who in 1990 published a short letter in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (62–63) in which he suggested this explanation for the low proportion of blacks in philosophy… Eighteen reactions were published, all of them negative, with some authors expressing strong disagreement and others condemning the APA for publishing Levin’s letter and calling it “racist propaganda.”…

Note:IL CASO LEVINE E LO SCANDALO SUSCITATO

A similar case (in which a prominent philosopher makes a late appearance) involves Frank Ellis, a former lecturer in Russian and Slavonic studies at the University of Leeds, who publicly expressed agreement with Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s claims, made in their controversy-generating book The Bell Curve (1994), about the black–white difference in intelligence and its social effects…The vice-chancellor of the university suspended him…

Note:LA SOSPENSIONE DEL PROF ELLIS: PARLARE DELLA DESTRA SI PUO’ MA DEI NERI NO

why should we have to work and study with racists and homophobes? The answer is: we should not (Times Higher Education Supplement, June 9, 2006).

Note:STEVEN FRENCH SU ELLIS MURRAY E HERRNTEIN… PAROLE ESEMPLARI

he is being “disciplined” solely because students found his views offensive, and thus a breach of the university’s obligation to promote “racial harmony”

Note:PUNITO PER RAGIONI DI ARMONIA

The Curious Case of Gottlob Frege

The most salient factor that makes Frege stand out from all those other philosophers discussed in this book, and might explain the asymmetry, is that he has been castigated for supporting what is regarded as an extreme right-wing view. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Frege states: “Unfortunately, his last years saw him become politically conservative and right-wing…Why is it deemed “unfortunate” that in his last years Frege became “politically conservative and right-wing”?…

Note:PERCHÈ TANTO CHIASSO SU FREGE E SILENZIO SU MOLTI ALTRI

Notice, again, that no one has used the word “distasteful” (let alone “very distasteful”) and no one has been “shocked” (let alone “deeply shocked”) nor “upset” (let alone “very, very upset”) over any of the aforementioned cases of leading philosophers publicly supporting murderous totalitarian regimes of the left.

Note:ASIMMETRIA PATENTE

Sluga (op. cit.) went further and claimed, also relying on Frege’s diary, that one of Frege’s “heroes” at the end of his life was Adolf Hitler.

FREGE FAN DI HITLER?... NON SCHERZIAMO

Agreeing with Hitler’s claim about a political disorientation in post-Bismarck Germany in no way implies support for Hitler’s politics, and certainly not “something close to admiration” for him.

Note:MA…

in contrast to Heidegger, who publicly supported the Nazi Party for years after it came to power and after its policies left no doubt about its true goals and methods, Frege was jotting notes in his private diary nine years before Hitler became the chancellor of Germany and more than one year before Mein Kampf was published.

Note:DIFFERENZE CON HEIDEGGER

Frege’s chief sin was anti-Semitism, but we should not forget that historically anti-Semitism has not been exclusively a right-wing phenomenon…“Like the left in France and Germany, the British left played a central role in the popular dissemination of anti-Semitism in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain” (Brustein 2003, 89; emphasis added)….

Note:L‘ANTISEMITISMO DI FREGE

What is perceived as a right-wing deviation is not easily forgiven in contemporary philosophy. In contrast, much worse left-wing sins are typically passed over and excused.

Note:SOLO SBALLARE A DESTRA E’ IMPERDONABILE

A good illustration of this bias is again Glover’s book Humanity (1999)…The part about Nazism has an entire chapter, titled “Philosophers,” in which Glover criticizes the political views of Heidegger and Frege as well as those of some obscure philosophers like Alfred Bäumler and Lothar Tirala. In contrast, Glover did not include a “Philosophers” chapter in the part about Stalinism and Maoism, although it would have been easy to produce a much longer list of well-known philosophers who had fallen under the spell of Communist totalitarianism. The names that come to mind include Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Badiou, Lukács, Bloch, and many others,… Neurath, Russell, Wittgenstein, Lakatos, Cohen, Putnam, Davidson… Yet that chapter remained unwritten, and Glover never explained why philosophers deserved a whole chapter in one case but not in the other….

Note:ESEMPIO DI ASIMMETRIA

Richard Rorty said in an interview for the Believer in 2003: “I think all that September 11 changed was to give the fascists a chance. The Republicans saw that if they could keep us in a state of perpetual war from now on . . . they could keep electing Republicans more or less forever.”… Elsewhere Rorty associated Republicans with Hitler and the Nazis:…

Note:ROTRY… FASCISTI=REPUBBLICANI

But who was Eldridge Cleaver? He emerged from prison in 1966 after spending nine years there for rape and assault with intent to murder. He then joined the Black Panthers and became a presidential candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party in 1968.

Note:IL CANDIDATO PRESIDENTE DEI FILOSOFI DI PRINCETON

campus newspapers of two Ivy League universities recommended to its readers that they vote for Cleaver rather than for any of the major presidential candidates. The Harvard Crimson advised that “one should vote to the left of the major three candidates—whether it be for Eugene McCarthy, Eldridge Cleaver, Dick Gregory, Fred Halstead (Socialist Worker), or Henning Blomen (Socialist Labor),” and that “in states like Massachusetts where no left wing candidates qualify for the ballot or for a legal write in, one should refuse to vote for the Presidency.” The Columbia Daily Spectator went even further and officially endorsed Cleaver.

Note:GIORNALI ACCADEMICI

According to studies of the political attitudes of American professors at the time, the proportion of the professors’ vote for the far-left candidates (including Cleaver) in the 1968 presidential election was about ten times higher than in the general population (Ladd & Lipset 1972, 44).

Note:QUANTIFICARE IL BIAS

And Then He Started to Cry . . .

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the philosophers’ ability to concoct seemingly good arguments even for rather implausible, or sometimes even preposterous, views.

Note:CI VUOLE UN GENIO PER GIUSTIFICARE CERTE PRATICHE

Living in a bubble and spending most of their time with politically like-minded leftist colleagues will cause even very clever people to start hyperbolizing the dangers and bad effects of right-wing politics

Note:LA SINDROME DELL’ACQUARIO

on LeiterReports.typepad.com, the most-visited philosophy blog on the Internet—which most philosophers check regularly to get professional news about their discipline (new hirings, changes in the expert ranking of top philosophy departments, professional gossip, etc.)—conservatives have been routinely referred to as “repugs,” “morally depraved,” “morally deranged,” “crackpots,” “lunatics,” “idiots,” “twits,” “nuts,” “slimy,” “stupid,” “crazies,” “villains,” “moral monsters,” “fools,” “fascistic psychopaths,” “Neanderthals,” “despicable Neanderthals,” “sociopaths,” “threats to humanity,” “morons,” “dishonest scumbags,” “right-wing slime artists,” “noxious right-wing creeps,” and “brainless fascist thugs.”

Note:LEITER

Consider the asymmetry: A single private email from Leiter, followed by a Twitter post, started this avalanche of outrage among hundreds of philosophers, but his years-long uncontrolled torrent of public insults directed at his conservative colleagues and Republicans was never seen as a problem.

Note:E QUANDO SU LEITER APPARE UN EMAIL ANOMALA CHE OFFENDE I “COMUNISTI” DEI DIPARTIMENTI DI FILOSOFIA…

Are All Rich People Thieves?

Consider first an interesting example involving Derek Parfit, one of the most influential living philosophers. It would be very hard to find an analytic thinker today who is held in higher regard.

Note:PARFIT... IL GURU

At the beginning of his talk Parfit says that according to William Godwin, if you walk past a beggar and you don’t give him your coins, you’re stealing; the money doesn’t belong to you, because the beggar needs it more than you, so you’re stealing (“Derek Parfit—Full Address,” YouTube, 8:15–8:39). Immediately after citing Godwin’s eccentric opinion that not giving to a beggar equals stealing from him, Parfit surprisingly goes on to agree with it enthusiastically: “Well, that is actually what I feel we rich people . . . in the world today are doing. We’re not entitled to our vast wealth.”

Note:CHI NON DONA RUBA

(1)   It seems to me fairly clear that the great wealth that we rich people have isn’t in a moral sense ours to give. It’s legally ours, but it’s not morally ours.        (2)   I’m not entitled to my vast wealth compared with these two billion people in Africa.        (3)   There’s no way in which I’ve come to deserve it and they haven’t (ibid., 6:55–7:19).

Note:L’ARGOMENTO PER CUI I RICCHI RUBEREBBERO

The problem with Parfit’s logic is twofold. First, he provides no real evidence (let alone compelling evidence) for the sweeping assertion (3), and second, even if he did, (2) would still not follow.

Note:UN ARGOMENTO CHE FA ACQUA

such a radical approach to economic redistribution is almost unheard of. In terms of ordinary political taxonomy, it is best classified as belonging to the extreme fringe of the extreme left.

Note:RADICALISMO ESTREMO

Let the Massacre Begin!” Said the Ethicist

Another example is provided by the philosopher Jeremy Waldron… Waldron participated in the debate “Is Torture Ever Permissible?” at Columbia University on April 21, 2005…. he was inevitably asked about the notorious “ticking bomb scenario”: What would Waldron’s advice be if a nuclear device were planted in New York City and if the only way to save millions of innocent people from a certain and horrible death were to torture an arrested terrorist who knew the location of the bomb? He replied that the answer is clear: Since morality tells us there are certain things that must not be done under any conditions—and torture is one of those things—then it follows that in that kind of situation we should “take the hit” and let all these millions of people die…. He is saying that if he had to choose between (1) saving millions of lives in the only way possible, by applying rough treatment (say, waterboarding, which he regards as torture) to one of the organizers of the impending nuclear attack on New York, and (2) protecting the perpetrator from any mistreatment, with the result that millions of people would die, he would choose (2)….

Note:IL CASO JEREMY WALDRON: CHE MUOIANO MILIONI DI AMERICANI PIUTTOSTO CHE TORTURARE UN TERRORISTA

Excellently Wise and Excellently Foolish

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How was it possible that other extremely smart people managed to believe—despite all the evidence to the contrary—that, among other things, the existence of the Iron Curtain was to be blamed on the United States; that Enver Hoxha’s regime in Albania was great; that all rich people in the West are thieves; that those convicted in the Moscow show trials were guilty as charged; that an appropriate reaction to the collapse of Soviet Communism was “a feeling of loss”; that there was no reason to join the war against Hitler until June 22, 1941; and that the United States in the 1950s was as much a police state as Hitler’s Germany?

Note:IL DILEMMA PIU’ IN GENERALE: PERCHÈ I PIÙ INTELLIGENTI SONO ANCHE I PIÙ SCEMI QUANDO L’ARGOMENTO È POLITICO?

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For between true science, and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle. Natural sense and imagination are not subject to absurdity…In accordance with what Hobbes says, philosophers are also good both at becoming “excellently wise” (in their strictly philosophical area of specialization) and “excellently foolish” (in politics, as numerous examples in this book illustrate)….

Note:HOBBES: L’GNORANTE DI SOLITO ASSUME UNA POSIZIONE INTERMEDIA

Being foolish in philosophy is immediately followed by a heavy penalty (loss of reputation), but being foolish in politics often incurs no cost at all, assuming of course that the foolishness is of the leftist variety.

LA STUPIDITÀ IN POLITICA È GRATUITA

Quell’idiota di Hilary Putnam

Hilary Putnam: A Follower of Chairman Mao – When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics – Neven Sesardic

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Argomenti trattati: per 4 anni HP aderì senza riserve ad un partito maoista duro e puro. Ma cosa passava nella testa dell’insigne e rigoroso filosofo? A cosa si deve un’impazzimento del genere? – predicare l’evidenza per poi aderire a culti esoterici – puo’ esistere un maoista intelligente? – ancora oggi duro di comprendonio – la svolta… albanese – quell’insana voglia di far fuori i colleghi dissenzienti –

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Hilary Putnam was indisputably a central figure in contemporary philosophy. When he died in March 2016 the New York Times published an obituary calling him “a giant of modern philosophy.”

Note:UN GIGANTE

A Lover of Wisdom Joins a Cult

From 1968 to 1972, while he was in his forties, Putnam was a member of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), which the historian Ronald Radosh called “a Marxist-Leninist sect that made the Communist Party look like a group of tame reformists” (2001, 12).

Note:MARXISTA LENINISTA

One indication of the intensity of Putnam’s activism is that he himself said that during that phase he was “never able to function as a philosopher” (quoted in Borradori 1994, 56).

Note: UN IMPEGNO REALE ED INTENSO

a highly intelligent1, accomplished philosopher and exceptionally clear and rigorous thinker with some knowledge of politics—joining a party that glorifies Maoism? And staying in that party four years? In the middle of the Cultural Revolution? Something is very wrong here.

Note:PUÒ ESISTERE UN MAOISTA INTELLIGENTE?

Could it be that Putnam somehow failed to be informed about what was going on in China at the time? This is extremely unlikely. The reports about the terrible events there could have been missed only by someone who had been living on another planet

Note:INFORMATISSIMO

Inside the Chinese Utopia

How much did Putnam know about the situation in China? Surely he must have at least been following the New York Times, which on January 2, 1970, published a long article headlined “The Making of a Red Guard.”

Note:ESEMPIO DI INFO DISPONIBILE

Well, I did know about the Gulags. That is why I joined a group that supported no existing state.

Note:LA GIUSTIFICAZIONE NELLE PAROLE DEL FILOSOFO

This explanation will not do. If Putnam’s former party was Maoist, isn’t it clear that, contrary to what he says, it did support the political system and ideology of “an existing state,” namely China?

Note:RISPOSTA POCO SODDISFACENTE

Contrast this high praise of the PLP with Putnam’s strident condemnation of American mainstream politics over the years.

Note:DURI CON L’AMERICA, INDULGENTI CON LA CINA

In one interview Putnam comments very briefly on his involvement with the PLP: “I was connected with a Maoist group. I am no longer a Maoist” (Borradori 1994, 59)…. One would have expected here a follow-up question from the interviewer, because Putnam’s terse remark screams out for further explanation… But there was no curiosity about this…. But there was no curiosity about this…. Would university professors have reacted with similar indifference and mild amusement if, in the sixties, a leading Harvard scholar had praised, say, the authoritarian regime in Spain and campaigned passionately to introduce Franco’s political system in the United States?…

Note:INTERVISTE SDRAIATE

Here is what he said in an interview many years after he abandoned his attempts to bring the Chinese Communist utopia to America: “Then we had two very atheist dictators, called Stalin and Hitler, who between them killed even more people than anyone had killed in the name of the sacred” (Borradori 1994, 65). How can one talk about murderous atheist dictators without mentioning Mao?

Note: ANCHE DOPO DURO DI COMPRENDONIO

At one point Putnam’s party experienced a huge disappointment with the Chinese “road to socialism” and then took the Albanian turn

Note:COLPO DI SCENA: LA SVOLTA ALBANESE

In a 1972 talk at Princeton he first gratuitously labeled the psychologist Richard Herrnstein as “racist” (see p. 166, footnote 2, for the explanation of why this accusation was wrong) and then publicly urged that Herrnstein be fired from the university (see the Daily Princetonian, March 13, 1972).

Note:IL VIZIETTO DEL CHARACTER ASSASSINATION

The fact that Putnam’s intolerance for different opinions sometimes went so far that he was willing to denounce other scholars in a way that trampled basic principles of academic freedom shows that, after all, joining a Maoist party may have been an excellent fit for someone with his views on politics and scholarship.

IL MAOISMO GLI SI ADDICEVA

L’esplosione dell’intelligenza

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies – Nick Bostrom

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Argomento: avremo “superintelligenza” quando le macchine intelligenti sapranno costruire in breve tempo macchine più intelligenti di loro che sapranno costruire macchine più intelligenti di loro e così via all’infinito –  trend: nel 2100 la famiglia media sarà 34 volte più ricca di oggi – IA sa replicare l’uomo pensante ma trova ostacoli nel fare cio’ che l’uomo fa senza pensare –  perché gli scacchisti (e i pc che li battono) non sono particolarmente intelligenti – intelligenza generale e intelligenza specifica – quando arriverà IA? 10-50-80 –

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Past developments and present capabilities

History, at the largest scale, seems to exhibit a sequence of distinct growth modes, each much more rapid than its predecessor. This pattern has been taken to suggest that another (even faster) growth mode might be possible.

Note: SINGOLARITA’ PRECEDENTI

Growth modes and big history

On a geological or even evolutionary timescale, the rise of Homo sapiens from our last common ancestor with the great apes happened swiftly. We developed upright posture, opposable thumbs, and—crucially—some relatively minor changes in brain size and neurological organization that led to a great leap in cognitive ability. As a consequence, humans can think abstractly, communicate complex thoughts, and culturally accumulate information

Note:HOMO SAPIENS… TEMPI GEOLOGICI

More people meant more ideas; greater densities meant that ideas could spread more readily and that some individuals could devote themselves to developing specialized skills. These developments increased the rate of growth of economic productivity and technological capacity.

Note:PIÙ POPOLAZIONE, PIU’ IDEE, PIU’ VELOCITA’ NELLO SVILUPPO

A few hundred thousand years ago, in early human (or hominid) prehistory, growth was so slow that it took on the order of one million years for human productive capacity to increase sufficiently to sustain an additional one million individuals living at subsistence level. By 5000 bc, following the Agricultural Revolution, the rate of growth had increased to the point where the same amount of growth took just two centuries. Today, following the Industrial Revolution, the world economy grows on average by that amount every ninety minutes.

Note:ACCELERAZIONE NELLA CRESCITA

If the world economy continues to grow at the same pace as it has over the past fifty years, then the world will be some 4.8 times richer by 2050 and about 34 times richer by 2100 than it is today.

Note:LA RICCHEZZA NEL 2100

If another such transition to a different growth mode were to occur, and it were of similar magnitude to the previous two, it would result in a new growth regime in which the world economy would double in size about every two weeks.

Note:E IL FUTURO?

The singularity-related idea that interests us here is the possibility of an intelligence explosion, particularly the prospect of machine superintelligence.

Note:SUPERINTELLIGENZA

the case for taking seriously the prospect of a machine intelligence revolution need not rely on curve-fitting exercises or extrapolations from past economic growth.

Note:IL METODO DELL‘ESTRAPOLAZIONE

Great expectations

Machines matching humans in general intelligence—that is, possessing common sense and an effective ability to learn, reason, and plan to meet complex information-processing challenges across a wide range of natural and abstract domains—have been expected since the invention of computers in the 1940s. At that time, the advent of such machines was often placed some twenty years into the future.

Note:IA… ASPETTATIVE TRADITE

however many stops there are between here and human-level machine intelligence, the latter is not the final destination. The next stop, just a short distance farther along the tracks, is superhuman-level machine intelligence.

Note:NON IA MA SUPER IA

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

Note:DEFINIZIONE DI SUPER IA DA PARTE DI I J GOOD

In later decades, systems would be created that demonstrated that machines could compose music in the style of various classical composers, outperform junior doctors in certain clinical diagnostic tasks, drive cars autonomously, and make patentable inventions.19

Note:AD OGGI

The methods that produced successes in the early demonstration systems often proved difficult to extend to a wider variety of problems or to harder problem instances. One reason for this is the “combinatorial explosion” of possibilities that must be explored by methods that rely on something like exhaustive search.

Note:MA…

To overcome the combinatorial explosion, one needs algorithms that exploit structure in the target domain and take advantage of prior knowledge by using heuristic search, planning, and flexible abstract representations

Note: L’OSTACOLO DELL’ESPLOSIONE COMBINATORIA

The performance of these early systems also suffered because of poor methods for handling uncertainty, reliance on brittle and ungrounded symbolic representations

Note:ALTRO OSTACOLO: L’INCERTEZZA

The ensuing years saw a great proliferation of expert systems. Designed as support tools for decision makers,

Note:SISTEMI ESPERTI... AFFIANCAMENTO

The newly popular techniques, which included neural networks and genetic algorithms, promised to overcome some of the shortcomings

Note:NUOVE TECNICHE

one of the major theoretical developments of the past twenty years has been a clearer realization of how superficially disparate techniques can be understood as special cases within a common mathematical framework…This perspective allows neural nets to be compared with a larger class of algorithms for learning classifiers from examples—“decision trees,” “logistic regression models,” “support vector machines,” “naive Bayes,” “k-nearest-neighbors regression,” among others….

Note:CASI SPECIALI E VARIETÀ DI APPROCCIO

Accordingly, one can view artificial intelligence as a quest to find shortcuts: ways of tractably approximating the Bayesian ideal by sacrificing some optimality

Note:IA E L’OTTIMO

relating learning problems from specific domains to the general problem of Bayesian inference

Note:BAYES SEMPRE  SULLO SFONDO

Artificial intelligence already outperforms human intelligence in many domains…AIs now beat human champions in a wide range of games…

Note:MACCHINE GIA’ SUPERIORI ALL’UOMO IN MOLTI CAMPI

It was once supposed, perhaps not unreasonably, that in order for a computer to play chess at grandmaster level, it would have to be endowed with a high degree of general intelligence…Not so. It turned out to be possible to build a perfectly fine chess engine around a special-purpose algorithm.40 When implemented on the fast processors that became available towards the end of the twentieth century, it produces very strong play…

Note:SCACCHI IQ E INTELLIGENZA SPECIFICA

Donald Knuth was struck that “AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking’—that, somehow, is much harder!”

Note:CIÒ CHE SI FA SENZA PENSARE

Common sense and natural language understanding have also turned out to be difficult.

Note:SENSO COMUNE

Chess-playing expertise turned out to be achievable by means of a surprisingly simple algorithm. It is tempting to speculate that other capabilities—such as general reasoning ability, or some key ability involved in programming—might likewise be achievable through some surprisingly simple algorithm. The fact that the best performance at one time is attained through a complicated mechanism does not mean that no simple mechanism could do the job as well or better.

Note:SEMPLICITÀ E SCORCIATOIE… LA SPERANZA IA

Now, it must be stressed that the demarcation between artificial intelligence and software in general is not sharp… though this brings us back to McCarthy’s dictum that when something works it is no longer called AI. A more relevant distinction for our purposes is that between systems that have a narrow range of cognitive capability (whether they be called “AI” or not) and systems that have more generally applicable problem-solving capacities…

NoteTASSONOMIA

One high-stakes and extremely competitive environment in which AI systems operate today is the global financial market.

Note:MERCATI FINANZIARI… UN AMBITO GIA’ DOMINATO DALLE MACCHINE

Opinions about the future of machine intelligence

Nils Nilsson, one of the old-timers in the field, complains that his present-day colleagues lack the boldness of spirit that propelled the pioneers of his own generation…Nilsson’s sentiment has been echoed by several others of the founders, including Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, and Patrick Winston….

Note:MANCA L’AUDACIA DI UN TEMPO

Expert opinions about the future of AI vary wildly. There is disagreement about timescales as well as about what forms AI might eventually take.

Note:DISACCORDO

The combined sample gave the following (median) estimate: 10% probability of HLMI by 2022, 50% probability by 2040, and 90% probability by 2075.

Note:SONDAGGIO TRA ESPERTI

10% chance: 2030 50% chance: 2050 90% chance: 2100

Note:NILS NILSSON

My own view is that the median numbers reported in the expert survey do not have enough probability mass on later arrival dates. A 10% probability of HLMI not having been developed by 2075 or even 2100 (after conditionalizing on “human scientific activity continuing without major negative disruption”) seems too low.

Note:I NUMERI ANDREBBERO ALZATI

Historically, AI researchers have not had a strong record of being able to predict the rate of advances in their own field or the shape that such advances would take.

Note:RECORD TRACK MOLTO SCARSO

Small sample sizes, selection biases, and—above all—the inherent unreliability of the subjective opinions elicited mean that one should not read too much into these expert surveys and interviews.

PROBLEMI DELLO STRUMENTO SONDAGGISTICO