We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.
But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.
This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.
So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).
Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.
In that case let’s stop calling it ai, because it isn’t and use it’s correct abbreviation: llm.
It’s means “it is”.
Kinda dumb that apostrophe s means possessive in some circumstances and then a contraction in others.
I wonder how different it’ll be in 500 years.
I disagree with this notion. I think it’s dangerously unresponsible to only assume AI is stupid. Everyone should also assume that with a certain probabilty AI can become dangerously self aware. I revcommend everyone to read what Daniel Kokotaijlo, previous employees of OpenAI, predicts: https://ai-2027.com/
The thing is, ai is compression of intelligence but not intelligence itself. That’s the part that confuses people. Ai is the ability to put anything describable into a compressed zip.
I think you meant compression. This is exactly how I prefer to describe it, except I also mention lossy compression for those that would understand what that means.
Lol woops I guess autocorrect got me with the compassion
Hardly surprising human brains are also extremely lossy. Way more lossy than AI. If we want to keep up our manifest exceptionalism, we’d better start definning narrower version of intelligence that isn’t going to soon have. Embodied intelligence, is NOT one of those.
Amen! When I say the same things this author is saying I get, “It’S NoT StAtIsTiCs! LeArN aBoUt AI bEfOrE yOu CoMmEnT, dUmBaSs!”
And yet, paradoxically, it is far more intelligent than those people who think it is intelligent.
It’s more intelligent than most people, we just have to raise the bar on what intelligence is and it will never be intelligent.
Fortunately, as long as we keep a fuzzy concept like intelligence as the yardstick of our exceptionalism, we will remain exceptionnal forever.
People who don’t like “AI” should check out the newsletter and / or podcast of Ed Zitron. He goes hard on the topic.
Citation Needed (by Molly White) also frequently bashes AI.
I like her stuff because, no matter how you feel about crypto, AI, or other big tech, you can never fault her reporting. She steers clear of any subjective accusations or prognostication.
It’s all “ABC person claimed XYZ thing on such and such date, and then 24 hours later submitted a report to the FTC claiming the exact opposite. They later bought $5 million worth of Trumpcoin, and two weeks later the FTC announced they were dropping the lawsuit.”
I’m subscribed to her Web3 is Going Great RSS. She coded the website in straight HTML, according to a podcast that I listen to. She’s great.
I didn’t know she had a podcast. I just added it to my backup playlist. If it’s as good as I hope it is, it’ll get moved to the primary playlist. Thanks!
Good luck. Even David Attenborrough can’t help but anthropomorphize. People will feel sorry for a picture of a dot separated from a cluster of other dots. The play by AI companies is that it’s human nature for us to want to give just about every damn thing human qualities. I’d explain more but as I write this my smoke alarm is beeping a low battery warning, and I need to go put the poor dear out of its misery.
David Attenborrough is also 99 years old, so we can just let him say things at this point. Doesn’t need to make sense, just smile and nod. Lol
This is the current problem with “misalignment”. It’s a real issue, but it’s not “AI lying to prevent itself from being shut off” as a lot of articles tend to anthropomorphize it. The issue is (generally speaking) it’s trying to maximize a numerical reward by providing responses to people that they find satisfactory. A legion of tech CEOs are flogging the algorithm to do just that, and as we all know, most people don’t actually want to hear the truth. They want to hear what they want to hear.
LLMs are a poor stand in for actual AI, but they are at least proficient at the actual thing they are doing. Which leads us to things like this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKCynxiV_8I
I’m still sad about that dot. 😥
I’ve never been fooled by their claims of it being intelligent.
Its basically an overly complicated series of if/then statements that try to guess the next series of inputs.
I love this resource, https://thebullshitmachines.com/ (i.e. see lesson 1)…
In a series of five- to ten-minute lessons, we will explain what these machines are, how they work, and how to thrive in a world where they are everywhere.
You will learn when these systems can save you a lot of time and effort. You will learn when they are likely to steer you wrong. And you will discover how to see through the hype to tell the difference. …
Also, Anthropic (ironically) has some nice paper(s) about the limits of “reasoning” in AI.
ChatGPT 2 was literally an Excel spreadsheet.
I guesstimate that it’s effectively a supermassive autocomplete algo that uses some TOTP-like factor to help it produce “unique” output every time.
And they’re running into issues due to increasingly ingesting AI-generated data.
Get your popcorn out! 🍿
I really hate the current AI bubble but that article you linked about “chatgpt 2 was literally an Excel spreadsheet” isn’t what the article is saying at all.
Fine, *could literally be.
And they’re running into issues due to increasingly ingesting AI-generated data.
There we go. Who coulda seen that coming! While that’s going to be a fun ride, at the same time companies all but mandate AS* to their employees.
I think most people tend to overlook the most obvious advantages and are overly focused on what is supposed to be and marketed as.
No need to think how to feed a thing into google to get a decent starting point for reading. No finding the correct terminology before finding the thing you are looking for. Just ask like you would ask a knowledgeable individual and you get an overview of what you wanted to ask in the first place.
Discuss a little to get the options and then start reading and researching the everliving shit out of them to confirm all the details.
Agreed.
When I was a kid we went to the library. If a card catalog didn’t yield the book you needed, you asked the librarian. They often helped. No one sat around after the library wondering if the librarian was “truly intelligent”.
These are tools. Tools slowly get better. Is a tool make life easier or your work better, you’ll eventually use it.
Yes, there are woodworkers that eschew power tools but they are not typical. They have a niche market, and that’s great, but it’s a choice for the maker and user of their work.
Steve Gibson on his podcast, Security Now!, recently suggested that we should call it “Simulated Intelligence”. I tend to agree.
I’ve taken to calling it Automated Inference
you know what. when you look at it this way, its much easier to get less pissed.
reminds me of Mass Effect’s VI, “virtual intelligence”: a system that’s specifically designed to be not truly intelligent, as AI systems are banned throughout the galaxy for its potential to go rogue.
Pseudo-intelligence
I love that. It makes me want to take it a step further and just call it “imitation intelligence.”
If only there were a word, literally defined as:
Made by humans, especially in imitation of something natural.
throws hands up At least we tried.
Super duper shortsighted article.
I mean, sure, some points are valid. But there’s not just programmers involved, other professions such as psychologists and Philosophers and artists, doctors etc. too.
And I agree AGI probably won’t emerge from binary systems. However… There’s quantum computing on the rise. Latest theories of the mind and consciousness discuss how consciousness and our minds in general also appear to work with quantum states.
Finally, if biofeedback would be the deciding factor… That can be simulated, modeled after a sample of humans.
The article is just doomsday hoo ha, unbalanced.
Show both sides of the coin…
Honestly I don’t think we’ll have AGI until we can fully merge meat space and cyber space. Once we can simply plug our brains into a computer and fully interact with it then we may see AGI.
Obviously we’re not where near that level of man machine integration, I doubt we’ll see even the slightest chance of it being possible for at least 10 years and the very earliest. But when we do get there it’s a distinct chance that it’s more of a Borg situation where the computer takes a parasitic role than a symbiotic role.
But by the time we are able to fully integrate computers into our brains I believe we will have trained A.I. systems enough to learn by interaction and observation. So being plugged directly into the human brain it could take prior knowledge of genome mapping and other related tasks and apply them to mapping our brains and possibly growing artificial brains to achieve self awareness and independent thought.
Or we’ll just nuke ourselves out of existence and that will be that.
So many confident takes on AI by people who’ve never opened a book on the nature of sentience, free will, intelligence, philosophy of mind, brain vs mind, etc.
There are hundreds of serious volumes on these, not to mention the plethora of casual pop science books with some of these basic thought experiments and hypotheses.
Seems like more and more incredibly shallow articles on AI are appearing every day, which is to be expected with the rapid decline of professional journalism.
It’s a bit jarring and frankly offensive to be lectured ‘at’ by people who are obviously on the first step of their journey into this space.
Artificial Intelligent is supposed to be intelligent.
Calling LLMs intelligent is where it’s wrong.
Artificial Intelligent is supposed to be intelligent.
For the record, AI is not supposed to be intelligent.
It just has to appear intelligent. It can be all smoke-and-mirrors, giving the impression that it’s smart enough - provided it can perform the task at hand.
That’s why it’s termed artificial intelligence.
The subfield of Artificial General Intelligence is another story.
The field of artificial intelligence has also made incredible strides in the last decade, and the decade before that. The field of artificial general intelligence has been around for something like 70 years, and has made a really modest amount of progress in that time, on the scale of what they’re trying to do.
The field of artificial general intelligence has been around for something like 70 years, and has made a really modest amount of progress in that time, on the scale of what they’re trying to do.
I daresay it would stay this way until we figure out what intelligence is.
Another article written by a person who doesn’t realize that human intelligence is 100% about predicting sequences of things (including words), and therefore has only the most nebulous idea of how to tell the difference between an LLM and a person.
The result is a lot of uninformed flailing and some pithy statements. You can predict how the article is going to go just from the headline because it’s the same article you already read countless times.
So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure.
May as well have written “Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrr brghlgbhfblrghl.” It didn’t even occur to the author to ask, “what is thinking? what is reasoning?” The point was to write another junk article to get ad views. There is nothing of substance in it.
Wow. So when you typed that comment you were just predicting which words would be normal in this situation? Interesting delusion, but that’s not how people think. We apply reasoning processes to the situation, formulate ideas about it, and then create a series of words that express our ideas. But our ideas exist on their own, even if we never end up putting them into words or actions. That’s how organic intelligence differs from a Large Language Model.
Yes, and that is precisely what you have done in your response.
You saw something you disagreed with, as did I. You felt an impulse to argue about it, as did I. You predicted the right series of words to convey the are argument, and then typed them, as did I.
There is no deep thought to what either of us has done here. We have in fact both performed as little rigorous thought as necessary, instead relying on experience from seeing other people do the same thing, because that is vastly more efficient than doing a full philosophical disassembly of every last thing we converse about.
That disassembly is expensive. Not only does it take time, but it puts us at risk of having to reevaluate notions that we’re comfortable with, and would rather not revisit. I look at what you’ve written, and I see no sign of a mind that is in a state suitable for that. Your words are defensive (“delusion”) rather than curious, so how can you have a discussion that is intellectual, rather than merely pretending to be?
No, I didn’t start by predicting a series of words, I already had thoughts on the subject, which existed completely outside of this thread. By the way, I’ve been working on a scenario for my D&D campaign where there’s an evil queen who rules a murky empire to the East. There’s a race of uber-intelligent ogres her mages created, who then revolted. She managed to exile the ogres to a small valley once they reached a sort of power stalemate. She made a treaty with them whereby she leaves them alone and they stay in their little valley and don’t oppose her, or aid anyone who opposes her. I figured somehow these ogres, who are generally known as “Bane Ogres” because of an offhand comment the queen once made about them being the bane of her existence - would convey information to the player characters about a key to her destruction, but because of their treaty they have to do it without actually doing it. Not sure how to work that yet. Anyway, the point of this is that the completely out-of-context information I just gave you is in no way related to what we were talking about and wasn’t inspired by constructing a series of relevant words like you’re proposing. I also enjoy designing and printing 3d objects and programming little circuit thingys called ESP32 to do home automation. I didn’t get interested in that because of this thread, and I can’t imagine how a LLM-like mental process would prompt me to tell you about it, or why I would think you would be interested in knowing anything about my hobbies. Anyway, nice talking to you. Cute theory you got there about brain function tho, I can tell you’ve know people inside out.
Philosophers are so desperate for humans to be special. How is outputting things based on things it has learned any different to what humans do?
We observe things, we learn things and when required we do or say things based on the things we observed and learned. That’s exactly what the AI is doing.
I don’t think we have achieved “AGI” but I do think this argument is stupid.
How is outputting things based on things it has learned any different to what humans do?
Humans are not probabilistic, predictive chat models. If you think reasoning is taking a series of inputs, and then echoing the most common of those as output then you mustn’t reason well or often.
If you were born during the first industrial revolution, then you’d think the mind was a complicated machine. People seem to always anthropomorphize inventions of the era.
Do you think most people reason well?
The answer is why AI is so convincing.
If you were born during the first industrial revolution, then you’d think the mind was a complicated machine. People seem to always anthropomorphize inventions of the era.
This is great
When you typed this response, you were acting as a probabilistic, predictive chat model. You predicted the most likely effective sequence of words to convey ideas. You did this using very different circuitry, but the underlying strategy was the same.
No it’s really not at all the same. Humans don’t think according to the probabilities of what is the likely best next word.
How could you have a conversation about anything without the ability to predict the word most likely to be best?
No you think according to the chemical proteins floating around your head. You don’t even know he decisions your making when you make them.
You’re a meat based copy machine with a built in justification box.
Yes, the first step to determining that AI has no capability for cognition is apparently to admit that neither you nor anyone else has any real understanding of what cognition* is or how it can possibly arise from purely mechanistic computation (either with carbon or with silicon).
Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”
Given? Given by what? Fiction in which robots can’t comprehend the human concept called “love”?
*Or “sentience” or whatever other term is used to describe the same concept.
Most people, evidently including you, can only ever recycle old ideas. Like modern “AI”. Some of us can concieve new ideas.
