The Coevolution Book by Edward Ashford Lee Critical

I am asking for a critical summary rather than a critical evaluation. What I mean is that I want you to mostly focus on accurately summarizing Edward Lee’s arguments, noting what he is arguing against, and drawing out the significance his arguments or, to put it another way, what of importance rides on his arguments being correct.

I am asking for only ≈ 5 pages this time. That is, I am not looking for a critical summary of the entire book.

Here is a list of some of the questions you could set out to answer in your paper

You could speak to this cluster of arguments

a. not all machines are Turing machines

b. we ourselves are not Turing machines (how are we analog? how is our thinking not always algorithmic? why is the information that specifies or defines us not representable as a finite quantity of bits? How is it relevant that evolutionary history that makes us may not be finite since only what we inherit from our parents enters into our information? how is our cognition embodied? how do our minds result from interaction with the world?).

c. that we are not Turing machines casts doubts on speculative visions of uploading the mind and the immortality that could result therefrom

d. why is that we have a first-person sense of self, accountability, a sense of causality, potential for creativity that we can’t be sure that digital machines that do not share our biology will ever have?)

But I recommend that you use of these simpler prompts:

1. Critique of digital creationism; What he means by it, how it relates to evolutionary theory, why does it not capture the process of technological development, why he thinks it’s important to critique

1. Why are we not a Turing machines/ am I digital? See summary on p. 258. Also see chapter 8

1. Why does EAL not think we will be made irrelevant by machines (need some theory of the limitation of digital machines) or transcended by implants/cognitive prostheses into a post-human species but rather co-evolve with our technology (that coevolution can be understood as obligate and beneficial symbiosis and needs to be specified carefully)?

1. What do we better understand by transposing the properties of life (discussed in chapter 2) to digital machines? Where can this “analogy” be misleading?

1. Why is the engineer understood here not in terms of top-down design but as a source of mutation in complex evolutionary process?

1. What do you make of the analogy of the evolution of digital technology to both biological evolution and Dawkins’ memetic evolution (add theory of punctuated equilibrium).

1. Will we be able to hold digital living beings accountable? Chapter 10.

1. What is the nature and importance of feedback? How is ML based on feedback in a way that GOFAI was not? What kinds of feedback are humans capable of that machines are as of yet no? Chapters 4 and 5

1. Why does EAL see problems as pathologies rather than as alien attacks? Why exactly does he describe problems as pathologies? What are some likely pathologies? How could they be handled?

1. Should we lay more blame on engineers for not following good design principles for pathological technological developments than EAL recommends?

1. Is there a tension in the book between his worries about what I shall call human digital destructionism, e.g. unleashing viruses or ransomware, as the greatest threat of technology and his critique of digital creationism, which suggests humans don’t develop technologies in a top-down way.

1. In the coevolutionary process EAL also pays attention to the ways in which the human will evolve and have already evolved. How does he understand this side of the evolutionary process?