Orlando Stoics

This week we begin a new series where we ask the question whether we could build one on purpose, and whether it could then build the next one without us.

We begin with Irving John Good. In "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine" (1965), he noticed that designing machines is itself an intellectual task. So a machine that surpassed us at intellectual tasks would surpass us at that one too, and its successor would be better still, and the gap between generations would close. He called such a device the final invention we would ever need to make, provided it stayed docile enough to tell us how it worked. The whole later literature is a footnote to that conditional. Contribution: intelligence is the one capability that can be turned on itself.

We then turn to Ray Kurzweil, who supplied the timetable Good declined to give. His law of accelerating returns holds that technological progress compounds rather than accumulates, because each paradigm supplies the tools that build the next one, and that the resulting curve is exponential across evolution, computation, and cost. From this he reads dates off the graph: human-level machine intelligence around 2029, a singularity around 2045. Vernor Vinge had named the threshold in the 1980s; Kurzweil is the one who insisted we could see it coming. Contribution: the argument for imminence is an argument about a curve, not about a mechanism.

We arrive finally at Kevin Kelly, who asks what is actually being turned up. In "The Myth of a Superhuman AI" (2017), he argues that the case rests on unexamined assumptions: that intelligence is a single dimension, that it is general purpose, that it can be scaled without limit, and that having more of it dissolves most other problems. He proposes instead that minds occupy a combinatorial space of many specialized capacities, that humans are not general-purpose reasoners either, and that thinking is only one input to progress, since the rest is experiment, which runs at the speed of the world. Contribution: if intelligence has no single axis, then "smarter than every human" has no fixed meaning, and the explosion has no dial to turn.

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Irving John Good

Friendship plays a central role in Stoic philosophy. While the Stoics viewed virtue as the foundation of a flourishing life, they also recognized that meaningful friendships enrich our lives and provide opportunities to practice wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance.

Cicero's essay On Friendship (De Amicitia) raises questions that are still relevant today: What makes a true friend? How many friends should we have? Can friendship exist without virtue? During this session, we will discuss excerpts from the first fifty paragraphs of the book.

We'll explore a number of questions that sit at the heart of the essay. What is the foundation of a friendship, and where does our desire for it come from in the first place? Laelius argues that genuine friendship exists only between good people, so we'll ask what he really means by "good." We'll also consider questions that feel especially modern: what role does self-reliance play in friendships today, should we avoid having too many friends, and how can the friendships we keep help us become better people?

It helps to know the cast of characters behind the essay. The author is Marcus Tullius Cicero, who dedicates the work to his closest friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus. The main speaker is Gaius Laelius, who reflects on his deep bond with his best friend Scipio Aemilianus (Africanus the Younger), the model of ideal friendship throughout the piece. The essay itself unfolds as Laelius responds to questions posed by two younger men, Gaius Fannius and Quintus Mucius Scaevola.

No prior reading is required. We'll provide excerpts during the meeting and discuss them together.
English translations

Cada miércoles abrimos un espacio para leer juntos Las Meditaciones y conversar sobre cómo estas ideas pueden alegrar y fortalecer nuestra vida diaria.
No necesitas preparación previa, solo ganas de escuchar, compartir y disfrutar.
Ven con tu libro, tu café y tu sonrisa. ¡La tertulia se vuelve más bonita contigo!

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