Re: Mind and Artificial Intelligence: A Dialogue
Posted: Sat Jul 29, 2023 10:44 pm
‘Human Beings Are Soon Going to Be Eclipsed’
David Brooks
So, nothing has really changed at all for me. Only I am still entirely dependent on the "experts" here. What do I know about the technical reality of AI? It's just another rendition of the free will debate. There is the philosophical speculation that revolves around definitions and deductions and there is the scientific grasp of the human brain itself. And now the AI "brain".
To wit:
https://youtu.be/yWPyRSURYFQ
https://youtu.be/NwJEb3vJvWY
Let me know when AI entities get anywhere within the vicinity of this.
And then farther down the road...the terminators?
And yet the deeper mystery still revolves around whether human minds themselves are but nature's own automatons.
David Brooks
Yes, that is basically my own "gut" reaction to AI. It all still seems to revolve around flesh and blood human programming. At least in regard to the is/ought world. And that means [to me] the accumulated moral and political prejudices of the programmers themselves. And I believe that this is rooted existentially in dasein rather than in any sort of objective deontological assessment.But so far he has not fully converted me. I still see these things as inanimate tools. On our call I tried to briefly counter Hofstadter by arguing that the bots are not really thinking; they’re just piggybacking on human thought.
So, nothing has really changed at all for me. Only I am still entirely dependent on the "experts" here. What do I know about the technical reality of AI? It's just another rendition of the free will debate. There is the philosophical speculation that revolves around definitions and deductions and there is the scientific grasp of the human brain itself. And now the AI "brain".
So, really, how close is AI technology here and now to this level of complexity? And then the part where, as with the replicants in Blade Runner, they acquire an actual body such that if you pass them on the street, you can't tell them apart from us. And then the tricky part where the replicants themselves think that they are human.Starting as babies, we humans begin to build models of the world, and those models are informed by hard experiences and joyful experiences, emotional loss and delight, moral triumphs and moral failures — the mess of human life. A lot of the ensuing wisdom is stored deep in the unconscious recesses of our minds, but some of it is turned into language.
To wit:
https://youtu.be/yWPyRSURYFQ
https://youtu.be/NwJEb3vJvWY
Let me know when AI entities get anywhere within the vicinity of this.
And then farther down the road...the terminators?
Again, not being an "expert" here myself, I can only say that, yes, this has that "ring of truth" to me as well. Chatbots seems far, far removed from what human minds are capable of.A.I. is capable of synthesizing these linguistic expressions, which humans have put on the internet and, thus, into its training base. But, I’d still argue, the machine is not having anything like a human learning experience. It’s playing on the surface with language, but the emotion-drenched process of learning from actual experience and the hard-earned accumulation of what we call wisdom are absent.
And yet the deeper mystery still revolves around whether human minds themselves are but nature's own automatons.