Great piece! Yes, definitely a marketing myth. The myth of Artificial Intelligence by Erik Larson deconstructs this myth. I'd add there's another big myth. Not of AGI or Consciousness, but of utility. OpenAIs return on Investment hinges primarily on getting people (and orgs) to believe that they cannot compete without AI. Once we are dependent, we'd be willing to pay anything.
I think a lot of the discourse on consciousness - in this issue - is misplaced and just confuses things. Intelligence could be defined in a limited way so as to be applied to machines, but only so far as they replicate whatever we understand the human faculty of intelligence to be. I think where a lot of the heated reactions come from is the idea that human=consciousness=intelligence. That's not surprising in the circumstances. I think a way out of that kind of heat is to take the most important distinction to be what is natural and what is synthetic, or even better (with less unsavoury ideological associations) between 'phusis' and 'techne'.
Agree, I think a lot of this originates in a limited distinction between what is considered natural/unnatural, or real/virtual, where those are not necessarily helpful categories in most contexts.
Great piece! Yes, definitely a marketing myth. The myth of Artificial Intelligence by Erik Larson deconstructs this myth. I'd add there's another big myth. Not of AGI or Consciousness, but of utility. OpenAIs return on Investment hinges primarily on getting people (and orgs) to believe that they cannot compete without AI. Once we are dependent, we'd be willing to pay anything.
yeah i love that book! and that’s a really good point about building dependence
Very interesting overall. Nice comments here :)
I think a lot of the discourse on consciousness - in this issue - is misplaced and just confuses things. Intelligence could be defined in a limited way so as to be applied to machines, but only so far as they replicate whatever we understand the human faculty of intelligence to be. I think where a lot of the heated reactions come from is the idea that human=consciousness=intelligence. That's not surprising in the circumstances. I think a way out of that kind of heat is to take the most important distinction to be what is natural and what is synthetic, or even better (with less unsavoury ideological associations) between 'phusis' and 'techne'.
Agree, I think a lot of this originates in a limited distinction between what is considered natural/unnatural, or real/virtual, where those are not necessarily helpful categories in most contexts.
Yeah one of my colleagues also discusses how that binary thinking is constraining us.