You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto

Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities

noosphere, which is a supposed global brain formed by the sum of all the human brains connected through the internet

We all have to live with our imperfect ability to discern the proper boundaries of our circles of empathy

When you change the contents of your circle, you change your conception of yourself

We technologists are ceaselessly intrigued by rituals in which we attempt to pretend that people are obsolete.

So the suspense lay in wondering not whether a chess-playing computer would ever beat the best human chess player, but to what degree programming elegance would play a role in the victory.

Chess and computers are both direct descendants of the violence that drives evolution in the natural world, however sanitized and abstracted they may be in the context of civilization. The drive to compete is palpable in both computer science and chess, and when they are brought together, adrenaline flows.

Wikipedia, for instance, works on what I call the Oracle illusion, in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in precisely the same way and present many of the same problems.

the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.

What the test really tells us, however, even if it’s not necessarily what Turing hoped it would say, is that machine intelligence can only be known in a relative sense, in the eyes of a human beholder.