Updated tooling

As I started reading The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future by Andrew Pickering, I was struck by how cybernetics, from early on, defined the brain as an acting organ rather than a thinking one, and the huge impact this has. In the former case, we try to break down thinking into many small actions in response to a given input that produces an output. And now, we are starting to be more broad in our definition of thinking and intelligence, which makes a lot of sense in many contexts.

They say that the place you stand, the beliefs you hold, and the ideas that have formed you are your point of reference in explaining the world. You cannot imagine quasars without huge radio telescopes and the accompanying physics theories.

Perhaps with contemporary AI, we could come to a new understanding of the very nature of human intelligence and its inner mechanisms and workings. Instead of looking at the brain as a computer—Generation X is a prominent example when referring to memory storage and hard disks to explain, for example, the memory capacity of our brains—we are starting to look at it more in terms of probabilities, relations, pattern recognition, and proximities to ideas and previously accumulated knowledge. Because whenever we, as humanity, find a new tool —or a new paradigm—we tend to generalize it wherever we can. And that seems to be the case now.