Sam Altman wrote: “I am a stochastic parrot”. Bateson comments (in 1979): “The mountain, personified in our speech, will not become a person, will not learn a more personal way of being. But the human being, depersonified in his own talk, and thought, may indeed learn more thingish habits of action.”
The machine will be able to recreate all of this! But the surface of the whole earth will be too small to accommodate this machine — this machine whose dimensions and weight will continually increase as it attempts to reproduce the peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being.
Fascism annihilated tens of millions of people.
Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.
— Ivan Illich, 1984, Silence is a commons
Where moderation is not utterly overstepped, the wealth of sound in languages can be compared to coloration in painting. The…
I’ve been reading Daniel Dor’s manuscript Language as a Communication Technology (available here), and found this observation on grammaticality judgements…