Don't Care about Meaning

Here's a short email exchange with Caryn, on the common mix-up of meaning and relevance, kept for myself and posteriority.

Why are meaning and caring synonymous in most peoples mind?

By 'meaning', do you refer to 'meaningful life' (pervasive feeling of satisfaction), or semiotic reference? And by 'caring', do you refer to 'compassion for others', 'involvement' or 'motivational relevance'?

Well, to be precise, they relate to negation of meaning with the negation of caring. I think caring for the purpose of this discussion any of the three will work for the moment at least. With respect to meaning, I'm definitely not referring to meaningful life, more the semiotic sense.

Why the Western World View Abhors Artificial Intelligence

The dear, famous, Yoda like and sadly late Joseph Weizenbaum (the very guy we have to thank for the mother of all chat bots: Eliza) spent quite a bit of his time complaining about humanities overreaching optimism when it comes to the realization of Artificial Intelligence (see his: "Computer Power and Human Reason", for instance).

The charming, but totally misguided Weizenbaum documentary "Plug and Pray" cherishes that same popular thesis. It is hard to see how somebody could see any justification for it, though. Contemporary AI research is a very humble affair, occupied with obscure exercises in applied mathematics, boring standardization of protocol languages or tinkering with soccer playing or car driving robots. Any vision for generally intelligent artificial minds plays an extremely marginal role at best. At the same time, AI research has always been extremely productive: most of the stuff in computer science, from speech recognition to computer vision, from planning to data base systems, from data compression to data mining, has been concocted in some AI lab or other.

So what's the reason for the popular hostility towards Artificial Intelligence? Hmm, hmm: these guys are saying that the mind is a computer!
Why is that such a blasphemy?