The thought experiment presented in the fifth section of the chapter attempted to surmise of the noosphere is entirely comprised of human thought, and more specifically if others could contribute to it, namely machine learning systems. These systems are often reductively referred to as artificial intelligence, when really the current body of machine learning systems are more often better explained as pattern recognition systems. But to get to the point of the thought experiment, are contributions made by these systems meaningfully making an impact on the noosphere. Or in other words, do thought made from non-human actors influence the understanding of the world around us. I would agree with the author in that it only has become recently true with complex computer systems being able to produce results that cannot be found out by human thoughts alone. There is an increasingly larger body of knowledge which can only be sorted through these machine learning systems. Therefore, if there is only knowledge that can be accessed by complicated computing systems, they are heavily relied upon by researchers, philosophers, and policymakers alike to promote change in the noosphere. We have reached the point in which it is no longer a question of whether or not the noosphere includes computing outcomes, but how much of the noosphere is created by nonhuman actors, namely machine learning systems.
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