WORDS v WORLD: Semantics, AI & Language Revolution - Softcover

Eiffe, Gregory

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0646839942 ISBN 13: 9780646839943

Publisher: writobooks, 2021

Synopsis

Does AI require a radically new language of its own? For us, our language appears to offer a transparent window on the world, but a higher intelligence may find it an inadequate medium. While we know radiation comes in innumerable wavelengths, Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke confined their squabbles to visible light, for neither man could possibly anticipate the long radio waves that now carry information across continents, or the short x-rays that daily penetrate airport luggage and broken bodies seeking repair. Suppose that modern languages are but a visible section of a wider spectrum of possible expression, an unseen expanse whose extremities may soon have greater significance.
Words are capsules of abstraction, varying in degree. The technology associated with AI allows unprecedented manipulation of such verbal tokens, and so may allow them to exist in large numbers at novel "wavelengths". Such an innovation could allow resulting languages to address the greater world with fresh advantage: delivering greater insight and consistent creativity.
This is not a momentary speculation, but the late phase in a decades long effort, as will be articulated herein. The heretical nature of the proposition has ensured it a rocky road in a landscape still dominated by simplified views of cognition and language. So do delve further if your beliefs in this sector are open to challenge.
The cover image catches the author pausing in the Nevada desert on a journey between New York and San Francisco, between analog Kodak movie film and the emerging world of Apple digital graphics. The year is 1979.
Wittgenstein, Korzybski and Whorf emphasized the limitations of language. The author goes further, seeing the tension between abstract and concrete as a central human dilemma meriting intense development. Here then is a blend of memoir and supposition, an outlier challenge to the prevailing paradigm, seeking to push computing power beyond conversational AI to denser conceptual analyses, from vast quantity toward the more delicate metaverse above metaphor, and logic surpassing 'ana-logic'.
Praise for the earlier Interface Art: a provocative book in the style of Marshall McLuhan: Leonard Shlain (author of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Art and Physics, Leonardo's Brain) Reminiscent of Hofstädter in its remorseless tumble of gags and ideas, and you can't give better praise than that: Damien Broderick (The Australian (national newspaper) A unique book by a truly original mind that may one day take its place with Ted Nelson's Hypertext in the pantheon of obscure but influential computer books: Jules Marshall, (Mediamatic (avant-garde Dutch periodical)

Edition details

• Publisher: writobooks
• Publication date: 2021
• ISBN 10: 0646839942
• ISBN 13: 9780646839943
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 243