uzak's weblog

AI and the Illusion of Intelligence

 
Table of Contents

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Week 1

  • Some Curious Experiments
    • In early 1600 William Harvey examined the heart and understood it’s a pump.
    • A few years after Rene Descartes this concluded that machines cannot think - arrange it’s speech so it makes sense - what even the lowest type of man can do.
  • Alan Turing and the Imitation Game
  • Illusion of Intelligence
  • Explosion of Big Data

Week 2

  • The Chomskyan Revolution
    • Generative Gramar.
  • Descarte’s Miracle
  • The Fatal Flaw of the Chomskyan Revolution
  • Doing Violence to Language: the Ngram

Week 3

Moore’s Law Does Not Make the Singularity Likely

  • in the film 2001, the main character was the computer HAL, solution to all the main (AI) challenges. Along with these skills came human failings including paranoia and jealousy.
  • Singularity - computers will have far surpassed the humans. It will be an event impossible to understand. Our current understanding about world will not help us thinking what comes next and why.
  • Kurzweil predicts that Singularity will come 2045.

Week 4

We are not Computers

  • Turing asked: what is computation?
  • Turing: Halting Problem - some mathematically well-defined problems cannot be solved by computation.
  • We’ve been creating algorithms since the dawn of civilization.
  • Turing: computing is whatever a Turing machine can do.
  • Halting problem
  • We’ve no reason our brains are computers.
  • HAL is an entity capable of making decisions, having beliefs and pursuing goals. In short HAL is conscious.
  • Having (rich) internal life -> being conscious.

An Engine, the Parts of which are Men

  • Marx: Factory is engine parts of which are men.
  • Adam Smith: the man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations … becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become
  • Jaron Lenier and Sean Parker: social media is making is stupider. Technology can profoundly effect human mental ability and behaviours.
  • Marx’s factory can be thought of as a computer: from input it produces output. Marx: working in a factory is also reprogramming the workers into slightly changed mass of workers day by day.
  • As we develop the technological world, we’re able to reprogram out own mentali live in profound ways. This was always true and the process is beginning to accelerate.

From Gilligan’s Island to Lost

  • Simple vs. complex (challenging plots and storytelling of 2004’s Lost)
  • Creators of Gilligan’s Island (show from ’60s) were concerned the show would be too complex for the people to follow.

A New Kind of Being

  • The more AI develops the more it will develop changes in human intelligence and abilities.
  • John McCarthy: Intelligence: “the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world”
  • What people are able to do very much depends on what technological tools they’re able to use.
  • Not AI, but IA - intelligence augmentation.

Re-wiring the Human Parts

  • While all technologies change user, current tech platforms make it much more effectively.
  • Computer technology becomes more tightly integrated with the human uiser.

A New Kind of Being

  • Can AI reach the human level of intelligence? Wrong question!
  • Development of AI is development of human intelligence.