Анкета Аллы Меньшиковой ВКонтакте

- Вас ждет плохой конец...
- Зато начало было хорошим!

Ум полон гибкости и хамства,
Когда он с совестью в борьбе,
Мы никому не лжем так часто
И так удачно, как себе.

"At this very moment," he went on, "the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not. We feel sympathy, no doubt; we represent to ourselves imaginatively the sufferings of nations and individuals and we deplore them. But, after all, what are sympathy and imagination? Precious little, unless the person for whom we feel sympathy happens to be closely involved in our affections; and even then they don't go very far. And a good thing too; for if one had an imagination vivid enough and a sympathy sufficiently sensitive really to comprehend and to feel the sufferings of other people, one would never have a moment's peace of mind. A really sympathetic race would not so much as know the meaning of happiness. But luckily, as I've already said, we aren't a sympathetic race. At the beginning of the war I used to think I really suffered, through imagination and sympathy, with those who physically suffered. But after a month or two I had to admit that, honestly, I didn't. And yet I think I have a more vivid imagination than most. One is always alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world."

Humans have historically had a poor track record when it comes to attributing intelligence to complex information-processing agents around them, whether looking at humans from other cultures or at animals (such as octopuses, dolphins, great apes, etc.). We only reluctantly open up to the possibility that systems different from ourselves may be “intelligent” if they display relatable human-like behaviors that we associate with intelligence, such as language or tool use; behaviors that have high intrinsic complexity and high adaptability but that are not directly relatable (such as octopus camouflage) are not perceived as intelligent. This observation extends to collective entities (e.g. markets, companies, Science as an institution) and natural processes (e.g. biological evolution). Although they can be modeled as standalone systems whose abilities and behavior match broadly accepted definitions of intelligence (achieving goals across a wide range of environments, demonstrating flexibility and adaptability, etc.), we do not categorize these systems as intelligent, simply because they aren’t sufficiently human-like. [Chollet F. On the measure of intelligence //arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.01547. – 2019.]