WORLDVIEW ETHICS — What Is Distributed Cognition?

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Doug Lenat.‍

Introduction‍

The first five essays in this series have taken us from the AI Panic Letter and the Metabolic Theory of Consciousness through the primary insight I began to understand in graduate school, that language is a virtual, social, adaptive, and powerful computation & networking layer on top of individual human cognitive capabilities. Work by David Chalmers and Yoshua Bengio, among many others, has recently revealed that AI systems need integration to become thinkers. This might look like a series of modules enabling a given system to model a conversation based upon its varied specialties and then pass the information that results from these shared computational enterprises on to the user. Just as a brain takes in information, makes comparisons, and is changed as a result, a hypothetical general artificial intelligence could pull in information from a variety of specialized models using a shared global workspace, make comparisons, and then share the results with the user.

To build a conscious AI system remains an extremely difficult proposition, but the development of increasingly sophisticated neurological models of human intelligence supplies us with more than sufficient evidence of the real progress we’re making toward a basic…