This Noema article about the real dangers of AI by Shannon Vallor - and how they differ from those more typically bandied around in public debates - has saved me a great deal of time and mental anguish by precluding the need for me to actually write a similar article laying out more or less precisely my views on the subject. There is one slight inconsistency in the later acknowledgement that the notion of "human resources" as something akin to mechanically interchangeable parts in a machine designed primarily for the extraction of profit did in fact exist prior to the introduction of computer-based information systems, but this is a fairly minor quibble. Overall I think it does an excellent job of laying out the full scope of what is at stake when it comes to the question of artificial intelligence, and I would recommend it to almost anyone with a brain, especially if - like me - you have long suspected that the debate about AI may really revolve more around unresolved questions surrounding human intelligence and capabilities rather than resting on the various unqestioned assumptions often involved in the comparison of one type of intelligence to another.
Thanks also goes to Sean Carroll for the heads up on this one. By now I'm so firmly down my rabbit hole it may be some time before I get around to saying anything quite so sensible or indeed topical...
