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Quote of the Day: Hubbard on Automation
“One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.” — Elbert Hubbard
Are you ordinary? Or are you extraordinary? What do you think, Ricochet? Can an extraordinary man be replaced by a machine? Will it happen in the future?
Published in Group Writing
This is the Quote of the Day. There is still one blank spot on our schedule for the 28th. Or, if you have a hankering for the hither horizon, we also have openings in October.
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It can happen and it will happen. It is happening. I’m waiting for the Butlerian Jihad from Frank Herbert’s Dune and it’s prohibition “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind,”
We shall see what happens and how soon. Are you ready to lead the jihad?
John Henry was extraordinary.
I doubt it unless something fundamentally changes in the nature of machines. Even the most sophisticated machines are constrained in ways that humankind is not. Could this change? Maybe? If you presume that man in his ability to create is equal to the divine. Since I do not believe that, it will never be possible to replace an extraordinary man with a machine.
Man will never be able to create a machine like himself until he fully understands himself. I just watched a presentation on the “second brain” that is in the heart by a noted neurocardiologist. What struck me more than anything was how many times he would present a finding on a slide and say “I don’t understand this”.
So was Paul Bunyan (or, at least, he would have been if he’d been real). We can replace people who are physically extraordinary, and we can replace people who are mentally extraordinary in a single area, such as chess players.
Yes, but can we replace the extraordinarily lazy? 😉
– Winnie the Pooh
Well, at least it’s not being replaced by a machine, only a bear of very little brain.
I was going to try, but decided that it was too much effort.
Back in 2013, Tyler Cowen (in his book Average is Over) argued that computer technology is creating a sharp economic and class distinction between people who know how to effectively use these “genius machines” (a term he uses over and over) and those who don’t, and is also increasing inequality in other ways.
I responded to Tyler’s thoughts here–Musings on Tyler’s Technological Thoughts–including a passage from Peter Drucker, who described two old-line, hands on merchants, one of whom he calls “Uncle Henry” and the other of whom was Charlie Kellstadt of Sears. After relating some anecdotes about these two men and their management styles–and also introducing Uncle Henry’s son Irving, a Harvard B-school graduate, Drucker continues:
Fifty years or more ago the Uncle Henry’s and the Charlie Kellsadts dominated; then it was necessary for Son Irvin to emphasize systems, principles, and abstractions. There was need to balance the overly perceptual with a little conceptual discipline. I still remember the sense of liberation during those years in London when I stumbled onto the then new Symblolical Logic (which I later taught a few times), with its safeguards against tautologies and false analogies, against generalizing from isolated events, that is, from anecdotes, and its tools of semantic rigor. But now we again need the Uncle Henrys and Charlie Kellstadts. We have gone much too far toward dependence on untested quantification, toward symmetrical and purely formal models, toward argument from postulates rather than from experience, and toward moving from abstraction to abstraction without once touching the solid ground of concreteness. We are in danger of forgetting what Plato taught at the very beginning of systematic analysis and thought in the West, in two of the most beautiful and moving of his Dialogues, the Phaedrus and the Krito…They teach us that experience without the test of logic is not “rhetoric” but chitchat, and that logic without the test of experience is not “logic” but absurdity. Now we need to learn again what Charlie Kellstadt meant when he said, “How else can I see a problem in my mind’s eye?”
Ok, now define “human mind”. It’s harder than it seems. I could imagine a definition that would make something as simple as a music box fall under the Butlerian prohibition.
I would. But With Covid restrictions I’d have to do it remotely. Can you lead the anti-computer Jihad from your laptop? Or are the optics bad?
Hmmn, you may have a point.
I’m so ordinary I cannot even be seen.
The last two lines spoken in Dinner at Eight (1933):
Jean Harlow: They say that every profession will be replaced by machinery.
Marie Dressler: That’s something that you need never concern yourself about, my dear.
Marie Dressler! Oscar for Best Actress. Min and Bill.
Thanks for posting this quote. Elbert Hubbard was an interesting man who made significant cultural contributions. He and his wife were killed in 1915 when a German submarine torpedoed the Lusitania.
Which is definitely an interesting fact about him.
Heh.(TM) But what interests me are his contributions to the Arts and Crafts movement. Fascinating and influential.
Definitely. The Roycrofters were a big deal.
I think a rock handles that pretty nicely.
Even if we assume that the brain is more or less synonymous with the mind, can an AI computer every be able to feel empathy (or sympathy) if it has never experienced pain: either physical or emotional? There are children born with congenital anesthesia or inability to feel pain, and unfortunately they often die in childhood, because they have difficulty learning not to do things that cause their bodies to be damaged, and aren’t aware when they hurt themselves (because it doesn’t hurt).
Can we ever create a machine that can even approximate empathy when they can’t even ever feel things themselves? And if we make a machine without empathy, what will that machine not do?
I probably won’t read the book, but your review was worth reading even without the book.
Give me an idea of what you mean by extraordinary. The top one percent?
What AI (or machines) do is replace the ordinary.
There may come a time where everyone except the top one percent are replaced. But it might mean the ordinary live a life of leisure with nothing to do.
Either that or have jobs that do nothing, giving the recipient the illusion that they’re useful. We actually have a lot of jobs already that are like that.
I think you’re on to something. Machines and computers appear to do one thing really well, but humans can do many things well.
I thought I heard a voice . . .
Is is cheating to say both?
I feel ordinary. But when I look back at what I’ve done in life (and what I have planned for the future), I have to say I feel extraordinary – until my wife asks me to take the trash to the dump . . .