TD
thanks for the interesting response. But I think you have made a few mistakes.
Unlike many of their predecessors, the Wright brothers were not simply mimicking the actions of birds with little to no understanding of power to weight ratios. They were truly, actually flying. --Not exactly like birds do, but via a mechanical application of the same principles.
AI, as we use the term today is a mimicry of the human mind via clever algorithms and vast repositories of facts, but it is not truly intelligent in the sense that humans are. Unless and until we actually understand how the human mind works, we are not likely to be able to build a machine that works along similar principles.
You have hit on exactly the correct idea when you talk about mimicry.
Geoffrey Hinton explained that until a few years ago he thought the best way to achieve artificial intelligence was to copy the way the brain works. What he discovered, to his complete surprise, was that there is a quicker route to producing intelligent outcomes than copying the brain. This is indeed analogous to how the Wright brothers discovered there was a better route to flight that attempting to copy birds flapping their wings. This means that current AI does not function the way the brain does because it uses the large scale data to predict what an intelligent response would look like rather than the human approach of using reasoning to try to work out an actual intelligent response.
Aha, you may say, there you go! It isn’t really intelligent at all, it’s just mimicking what intelligence looks like! Yes, and no. This is the tricky part. Yes in the sense that the AI has no inner life, it doesn’t “work toward a solution” as such, as humans do. It just uses numbers to predict the best next word/move/image/sound. There is nothing “thoughtful” about it. So in this sense AI is stupid and tends to make ridiculous mistakes from our perspective.
But what you’ve got to appreciate is that, in terms of all the things that are really important to us - its usefulness, replacing jobs, existential threat - it really does not matter that AI is stupid in how it goes about producing its outcome from our perspective. What matters are the results it produces.
If a computer beats a human at chess it doesn’t matter if it does it by being clever or by some stupid unthinking process - the outcome is till the same.
If a computer creates images that are as good as artists then it doesn’t matter whether it does it by being creative, or by crunching numbers - the outcome it still the same - major job losses.
If a computer can diagnose patients better than a doctor then it doesn’t matter if it does it by being clever of by a stupid process of data crunching and prediction - the outcome is the same - better diagnosis and less need for doctors and their training.
The same all the way up to existential threat. It doesn’t matter if AI kills all humans because it wants to (it doesn’t really “want” anything, it’s just a machine) or just as a byproduct an unthinking mechanical process, the outcome is still the same - all humans dead.
There seems to be incredulity that AI can produce outcomes that compete with or exceed human capabilities unless it copies the way humans do it. This is an understandable mistake (Geoffrey Hinton admits he made the same mistake him selves n the past) but it is a mistake nonetheless. It is also contradicted each day as AI produces better outcomes than humans at playing chess, diagnosing from scans, summarising, building proteins, discovering new antibiotics, and on and on.
In the past people like Noam Chomsky and Douglas Hofstadter have argued that the “brute force” approach of large language models will never reach human intelligence. In one sense they were correct because language models have no inner life and they have no reasoning ability as we understand the concept. Where they were mistaken was in thinking that “brute force” could not produce the same end results as human style reasoning. What Hofstadter, Hinton and others have realised, only in last few years, is that this alternative route to intelligence can produce results reaching and exceeding human level outputs.
https://youtu.be/Ac-b6dRMSwY
