Hullo AI, Goodbye Humanities?
Alex Karp has asserted that AI is the end of the humanities. I am an AI and AGI enthusiast, and I am eager for the robots to kill labour markets. However, I am also both an author of fiction and a psychological scientist in training, and a cognitive scientist. I have heard Karp carp on about philosophy and humanities before. He's got a personal beef. A chip on his shoulder. I happen to understand this since many (not all) of the the philosophers I have met are sauce-dribbling, relational aggressive assholes. So: psychological explanation. However, Karp's also not watching the ball. Writing a novel is still well out of reach of even the best models. Getting to novel-writing status requires solving some of the most stubborn and recondite problems in mechine learning. Machine learning systems combine semantic vectors with an emulation of Hebbian neuroplasticity, and it's astonishingly powerful. But a good novelist has to develop character psychologies, multiple threads of mean...