| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016879)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016879" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 1976 |
| ocrElapsed: 0.0 |
| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| Throughout his career, whether studying language, advocating a realistic biology of |
| mind, or examining the human condition through the lens of humanistic Enlightenment |
| ideas, psychologist Steven Pinker has embraced and championed a naturalistic |
| understanding of the universe and the computational theory of mind. He is perhaps the |
| first internationally recognized public intellectual whose recognition is based on the |
| advocacy of empirically based thinking about language, mind, and human nature. |
| "Just as Darwin made it possible for a thoughtful observer of the natural world to |
| do without creationism," he says, "Turing and others made it possible for a thoughtful |
| observer of the cognitive world to do without spiritualism." |
| In the debate about Al risk, he argues against prophecies of doom and gloom, |
| noting that they spring from the worst of our psychological biases exemplified |
| particularly by media reports: "Disaster scenarios are cheap to play out in the |
| probability-free zone of our imaginations, and they can always find a worried, |
| technophobic, or morbidly fascinated audience." Hence, over the centuries: Pandora, |
| Faust, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, Frankenstein, the population bomb, resource depletion, |
| HAL, suitcase nukes, the Y2K bug, and engulfment by nanotechnological grey goo. "A |
| characteristic of Al dystopias," he points out, "is that they project a parochial alpha- |
| male psychology onto the concept of intelligence.... History does turn up the occasional |
| megalomaniacal despot or psychopathic serial killer, but these are products of a history |
| of natural selection shaping testosterone-sensitive circuits in a certain species of primate, |
| not an inevitable feature of intelligent systems." |
| In the present essay, he applauds Wiener's belief in the strength of ideas vis-à-vis |
| the encroachment of technology. As Wiener so aptly put it, "The machine's danger to |
| society is not from the machine itself but from what man makes of it." |
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| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016879 |
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