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The child program and the history of AI
Full text linkIn this contribution I try to illustrate some of the most significant moments in the history of AI (Artificial Intelligence), imagining that they have been a series of subsequent stages in the development of the so called "Child Program." With this name Alan Turing - in Computing machinery and intelligence (1950) - described for the first time the idea of an algorithm "capable of being educated." After discussing Turing’s prophecy, I will present some milestones of research in AI considering that each is a piece of a "learning scheme" of extended intelligence, i.e. an intelligence ascribable not only to humans beings, but also to any subject able to support thinking functions. I propose that from the elements of this scheme it is possible to draw useful suggestions for human education in general. In the final part of the contribution, I will collect the elements into a synoptic vision, which I will call "the educational protocol of the extended intelligence." This will define the minimum requirements that a training course should possess in order to conduct a "child program" at the "adult program" stage
Techniques of Presence: A Way to Interpret Technoscience Starting from Ernesto De Martino’s Theory of Magic
Full text linkErnesto de Martino developed in the 1940s a theory of magic on philosophical grounds, while engaging a critical dialogue with the anthropology of his time. The central category of his study is that of the “crisis of presence”. Through it, the magical is interpreted as a historical response to an existential and permanent predicament of the human condition. The role of the shaman and the ritual are interpreted in an original way as countermovements against the risk of losing one's individual consistency (presence). Magic, from this perspective, reveals itself not to be primarily a way of dominating the natural world and making it function according to our needs and desires. While it does not lose this operative character, it proves to be initially born out of an inner condition of existential crisis. The purpose of this paper is to delineate the De Martino’s theory of the relationship to magic and to trace its connection to modern technosciences. Regarding the underlying need to which they respond and the way in which its procedures are conducted: In magical thinking there is no intention of developing a description of the world, instead a willingness to dominate its irregularities. Magic operates through recomposing human presence when it is threatened by forces outside its dominion. In our hypothesis, magicians appear as a kind of techno-scientists who succeed in obtaining a representation of the world only insofar as their interventions prove effective on it
Tecnica e guerra
No full textThe contribution examines the relationship between the concept of war and the notion of technology on the basis of the ideas of force, power and violence in western philosophical traditio
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