Witold Reichhartthe author
Questions

What I am busy with.

Each question with the essays and records behind it.

What is intelligence, at each level and in between?

A cell, a brain, an organisation, a model, an agent: each embodies intelligence at its own level, physical, biological, digital. And much of it is between the units rather than in them, as music is between the notes and an ant colony thinks in the traces its ants leave for each other. Lem warned that we recognise only the intelligence that looks like us; we have always imagined it as a version of ourselves, and even modelling a machine on our own brain is anthropocentrism of a high order. So the design question for AI is how big the acting unit should be, and what has to pass between units for the whole to be intelligent.

Who may let a machine act, on whose authority, and within what limit?

The question a financial institution has to answer this year, and the oldest question of delegated authority in a new body. A firm writes delegated authorities for its staff and runs its agents on entitlements. Between the two there has to be a mandate: who may delegate the act, what evidence the agent needs before it acts, when the firm may refuse, and who answers afterwards.

What is the value of what a model knows, and who pays for it?

A token has a price. What the model is permitted to rely on has none, so it is treated as free, and the cost appears later as a decision nobody can defend. Governed knowledge belongs in the economics of an AI task as a variable of its own.

What does AI do to the value of holding, binding, or predicting a person?

And how has binding of that kind come apart before, when it has come apart at all. The history of holding a person is a history of the instruments that made it pay, and AI is a new instrument.

How does participation give rise to knowledge, and then to wisdom?

The question behind all the others. Civilisations learned to act on answers they could not inspect, and each time the fix went around the decision and left the oracle alone. Some things can be designed; some can only be grown, with the rules written into the places where people meet.