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Bill Dembski

Freedom, Technology, Education

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Freedom, Technology, Education
Only the educated are free — Epictetus

Culture

Ray Manzarek’s 1973 album

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I was a big fan of the Doors in high school and, after Jim Morrison’s death, kept my eyes open to what his fellow band mates were doing. I remember buying Ray Manzarek’s 1973 album THE GOLDEN SCARAB and enjoying his song “The Purpose of Existence Is?” The vinyl of that album has long since been lost and it’s been over 35 years since I last heard that song. It was fun listening to it again today. Here are the lyrics:

Do you think the purpose of existence is to pass out of existence
Is the purpose of existence
Do you think the reason for your being is to give up all your being
Is the reason for your being
Then why are you living, what did you come here for?
You must have wanted something, here you are back for more
Life and its treasures, love sweet pleasure
Don’t let it end, try it again, over and over again
Birth and death, full circle and another incarnation
Life is sweet and oh so neat, the greatest of temptations
Is your world so empty that you want off this cosmic wheel
Is your soul so weary that you think the life you feel is illusion and pain
Ha! You’re just lazy and afraid of life and its danger
To love you’re a stranger.

The Future of Meaningful Work

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Here’s an article I just published at TheBestSchools.org on the challenge of artificial intelligence to meaningful human work:

The Rise of Machine Intelligence and the Future of Human Work

… Threats to jobs from technology have been with us since the Industrial Revolution. But in reading the White House paper, one gets the sense “this time is different.” An extended box on page 20 titled “The End of Work?” (the question mark is especially troubling) raises the possibility of AI not just phasing out some jobs but instead phasing out all human work period, rendering human work passé because, if the promise of AI comes true, everything that we can do machines will eventually do better. But even leaving aside such a grand dystopian vision (which these days is promoted with a smile by singularity and transhumanist enthusiasts), the paper argues convincingly that many jobs as we know them now won’t be around much longer. The case study it presents about AVs (automated vehicles) and the human drivers soon to be displaced is hard to discount.

Here at TBS Magazine, technology editor Erik Larson has written a series of insightful articles questioning the more extreme view of AI, which sees AI as superseding human intelligence and rendering humans (and thus human work) obsolete (cf. his general critique of AI as well as his history of computer chess and account of IBM Watson’s computer Jeopardy! player). Against this “strong AI” view, he shows that AI (especially its machine- and deep-learning offspring) have not only failed to prove themselves a match for human intelligence but also seem intrinsically incapable of matching human intelligence (human intelligence considered broadly and not just for narrow tasks, such as playing chess or Jeopardy!).

AI advocates tend to treat expressions of such skepticism as lame attempts by technological unsophisticates to preserve a humanistic vision of the world that is destined to founder against the onslaught of technological advance. But Larson’s argument, and a similar one that I’ve been advancing for over 25 years, is motivated not by a desperate need to preserve human exceptionalism over machines but rather by a sober assessment of the nature of computation and its limitations …

The Limitations of Our Time

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I usually like to start the workday with reading the lectionary, which includes readings from the Psalter, the Old Testament or Apocrypha, the New Testament (non-Gospels), and the Gospels. Additionally, on some days, there is a brief account of a saint who is celebrated that day along with a prayer remembering that saint (sometimes more than one saint is commemorated on a given day).

The other day, Edward Demby and Henry Delany were commemorated. Here was the prayer that was offered at their inspiration:

Loving God, we offer thanks for the ministries of Edward Thomas Demby and Henry Beard Delany, bishops of thy Church who, though limited by segregation, served faithfully to thy honor and glory. Assist us, we pray, to break through the limitations of our own time, that we may minister in obedience to Jesus Christ; who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

I like the phrase “limitations of our own time.” The phrase does not excuse the faults of our time, or of any time for that matter. Indeed, the two men commemorated here can rightly be said to have transcended the limitations of their time. [Read more…] about The Limitations of Our Time

Tribeca Film Festival cancels the film Vaxxed

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A week or so ago Robert De Niro was still supporting the showing of Vaxxed at the Tribeca Film Festival. Then last weekend he pulled the plug.

De Niro and his wife Grace have a son with autism. So do I. By unhappy coincidence, our son John’s cogitive capacities collapsed after a round of vaccinations when he was two.

“Vaccines are safe and effective.” That’s the mantra we continuously hear from Big Pharma as well as the same skeptics who over the years have been implacable foes of ID.

I’m not sure the precise role that vaccines played in my son John’s problems. He has a twin who received the same vaccines, but was unaffected. So if vaccines played a causal role in John’s autism, there must have been other predisposing factors.

My own sense is that vaccines pulled the trigger in our son John’s case. At the very least, I would thus have liked to see Tribeca allow Vaxxed to be shown and its content to be freely discussed.

But the pro-vaccine forces see it as a moral mission to suppress discussion of this topic. Andrew Wakefield, the director of Vaxxed, we are repeatedly told has been thoroughly discredited (discredited by interests incentivized to see him discredited).

I feel for Robert De Niro. He wanted to see Vaxxed get a hearing. But the pressure he faced for withdrawing the film must have been enormous. I saw a similar move a decade ago when the ID film The Privileged Planet was to be shown at the Smithsonian. The uproar against it was enormous.

I have not seen Vaxxed, but I look forward to seeing it. Click here for the film’s website.

Del Bigtree, the film’s producer, had an interesting interview, which was made before the film was nixed by Tribeca: