Human Language Technologies Research Center

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610278/why-even-a-moths-brain-is-smarter-than-an-ai/

Why even a moth’s brain is smarter than an AI A neural network that simulates the way moths recognize odors also shows how they learn so much faster than machines.

There is the question of how the world looks as a screen, and another, more important I think, is how we look as objects of perception from the position of the machines with which we co-occupy that world. Seeing ourselves through the “eyes” of this machinic Other who does not and cannot have an affective sense of aesthetics is a kind of disenchantment. We are just stuff in the world for “distributed machine cognition” to look at and to make sense of. Our own sapience is real and unique, but as we are things-to-observe-that-just-happen-to be-sapient, this doesn’t really matter to machine vision. This disenchantment is more than just like hearing the recorded sound of your own voice (“that’s not me”) it is potentially the clearing away of a closely guarded illusion. This uncomfortable recognition in the machine’s mirror is a kind of “reverse uncanny valley.” Instead being creeped out at how slightly inhuman the creature in the image appears, we are creeped out at how un-human we ourselves look through the creature’s eyes. This is something to continue to research further, but in and out of “art”.

http://dismagazine.com/discussion/73272/benjamin-bratton-machine-vision/

Benjamin Bratton | Machine Vision From planetary scale computation to the limits of cloud-based sovereignty, Benjamin Bratton talks to about his current research.