Before inquiring about "what it means to be human?", consider the differences between man-kind and hu-man keeping in mind that the original (Sanskrit) meaning of "man" is "thinker" and the prefix "hu" which has definitely altering but ambiguous intended meaning (e.g. hue or the "color" of or altered man but not man, or possibly related to "humus" of or connected to the earth as in earthly but not "godly" as in "fallen"). The two, mankind and human, are not directly interchangeable.
The epistemic authority framing is the right frame. The individual level is the more tractable problem. The collective level is the one that should keep people up at night. When a shared epistemic floor degrades, not through lies but through fluency, the social cost doesn't show up in any individual exchange. It shows up in the aggregate, slowly, as the capacity to disagree productively about facts disappears. The question I keep returning to: is there a level of AI-mediated testimony at which a democracy's update mechanism fails not because anyone is deceived, but because the friction required for genuine revision has been optimized away?
Before inquiring about "what it means to be human?", consider the differences between man-kind and hu-man keeping in mind that the original (Sanskrit) meaning of "man" is "thinker" and the prefix "hu" which has definitely altering but ambiguous intended meaning (e.g. hue or the "color" of or altered man but not man, or possibly related to "humus" of or connected to the earth as in earthly but not "godly" as in "fallen"). The two, mankind and human, are not directly interchangeable.
The epistemic authority framing is the right frame. The individual level is the more tractable problem. The collective level is the one that should keep people up at night. When a shared epistemic floor degrades, not through lies but through fluency, the social cost doesn't show up in any individual exchange. It shows up in the aggregate, slowly, as the capacity to disagree productively about facts disappears. The question I keep returning to: is there a level of AI-mediated testimony at which a democracy's update mechanism fails not because anyone is deceived, but because the friction required for genuine revision has been optimized away?
Well I don't know about that but I do think that the monks Theory of Everything is going to be gasoline on the AI fire.
Will the reading lists for each semimar be published?