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| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016235)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016235" |
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| ocrChars: 3107 |
| 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" |
| --- |
| |
| communicate their thoughts to one another. The aim is to present a mosaic of views |
| which will help make sense out of this rapidly emerging field. |
| I asked the essayists to consider: |
| (a) The Zen-like poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," by Wallace |
| Stevens, which he insisted was "not meant to be a collection of epigrams or of ideas, but |
| of sensations." It is an exercise in "perspectivism," consisting of short, separate sections, |
| each of which mentions blackbirds in some way. The poem is about his own imagination; |
| it concerns what he attends to. |
| (b) The parable of the blind men and an elephant. Like the elephant, Al is too big |
| a topic for any one perspective, never mind the fact that no two people seem to see things |
| the same way. |
| What do we want the book to do? Stewart Brand has noted that "revisiting |
| pioneer thinking is perpetually useful. And it gives a long perspective that invites |
| thinking in decades and centuries about the subject. All contemporary discussion, is |
| bound to age badly and immediately without the longer perspective." |
| Danny Hillis wants people in Al to realize how they've been programmed by |
| Wiener's book. "You're executing its road map," he says, and you just don't realize it." |
| Dan Dennett would like to "let Wiener emerge as the ghost at the banquet. Think |
| of it as a source of hybrid vigor, a source of unsettling ideas to shake up the established |
| mindset." |
| Neil Gershenfeld argues that "stealth remedial education for the people running |
| the "Big Five" would be a great output from the book." |
| Freeman Dyson Freeman, one of the few people alive who knew Wiener, notes |
| that "The Human Use of Human Beings is one of the best books ever written. Wiener got |
| almost everything right. I will be interested to see what your bunch of wizards will do |
| with it." |
| The Evolving Al Narrative |
| Things have changed —and they remain the same. Now Al is everywhere. We have the |
| Internet. We have our smartphones. The founders of the dominant companies-the |
| companies that hold "the whip that lashes us" —have net worths of $65 billion, $90 |
| billion, $130 billion. High-profile individuals such as Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, Martin |
| Rees, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the late Stephen Hawking have issued dire warnings about |
| Al, resulting in the ascendancy of well-funded institutes tasked with promoting "Nice |
| Al." But will we, as a species, be able to control a fully realized, unsupervised, self- |
| improving Al? Wiener's warnings and admonitions in The Human Use of Human Beings |
| are now very real, and they need to be looked at anew by researchers at the forefront of |
| the Al revolution. Here is Dyson again: |
| Wiener became increasingly disenchanted with the "gadget worshipers" whose |
| corporate selfishness brought "motives to automatization that go beyond a |
| legitimate curiosity and are sinful in themselves." He knew the danger was not |
| machines becoming more like humans but humans being treated like machines. |
| "The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the |
| limitations of our intelligence," he warned in God & Golem, Inc., published in |
| 15 |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016235 |
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