General Artificial Intelligence
GAI
I like ChatGPT. It's capabilities are pretty amazing. It has a dark side. Students are using it to write their assignments for instance which short circuits the process of learning to write.
Lawyers are using it to write briefs for court cases and are getting caught when the bot fabricates legal references.
ChatGTP isn't really intelligent in the way we think of ourselves as intelligent. There's a lesson in that. Maybe the way we think of our own intelligence is wrong.
Our concept of intelligence evolved at a time when people were thought to be animated by stuff like souls. Intelligence implied a spark of genius within us that was immaterial like a soul. Intelligence implied somebody understanding what was going on.
That's not the way ChatGPT works. I can't really describe how it works but it seems to detect a word sequence and then predicts what words would come next in the sequence. Nobody thinks that the bot even understands what the words mean. It's sort of an actualized version of Searle's famous Chinese Room where the room would be fed statements in Chinese and would respond in Chinese when none of the people within the room actually spoke Chinese at all..
ChatGPT goes quite a bit beyond Searle's thought experiment. The Chinese Room wasn't generating essays on any topic you cared to name. Nor could it write computer code with it.
I've used ChatGPT to write python code and it actually works but isn't very useful. You can end up with a code snippet that is like a black box. It works but one has no idea how it works or how to change it.
This is a limitation similar to the one facing the students who use the bot to do their assignments. You don't get the benefit of the practice of figuring the code out yourself.
I've long thought that google is a sort of AI that we've been embedded in for years. It really is a wonderful tool. I admit that it has caused my library research skills to atrophy. I haven't used a periodical index for decades now. But google doesn't contain a spark of genius any more than a library does.
Many people are working towards developing a General Artificial Intelligence; something that does have that spark of genius. And the fear is that that spark of genius could turn malevolent like our spark of genius can.
But then, I don't think that spark of genius is the right way to think of intelligence. For one thing - we've looked and that spark is noplace to be found which is significant ever since philosophers rejected dualism.
What we have found is perhaps more wonderful and amazing than a spark. When we look in detail we find evolution at work. Evolution not only created brains that were more or less intelligent; if you look at how the brain processes information to decide what to do you can see evolutionary processes at work. (http://www.simulat.ca/introductionsv2.php?title=Consciousness%20is%20More%20Like%20Fame%20Than%20Television)
In biology intelligence emerges in creatures that need to move to find resources and avoid being eaten. Wonderful as plants are, we don't think of them as being intelligent. Nor jellyfish. And there seems to be a continuum of intelligence capabilities. These all involve autonomous creatures going about their own projects for their own reasons. Let's call that natural intelligence (NI).
Natural intelligence is always embodied - that is, it occurs in creatures with bodies. People might be said to have general natural intelligence (gni) as opposed to general artificial intelligence.
Google may have billions of eyes and ears but it has no body. It can't move around. Same with chatbots.
Reality has no purpose but evolution creates purpose within reality. We can ask questions like "why did the chicken cross the road?" The chicken has a purpose. A rock rolling down hill doesn't.
Google has a purpose of course - but it's a human purpose of people gaining wealth and power - Google itself has no desire and no projects. As far as we know.
Science fiction has explored the theme of GAI's running amok a lot from Asimov's robots to Terminator so the danger is vivid to the imagination. It would be the end of humanity people fear.
Sigh - I look at the news and thinks - we're gonna do the job ourselves.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.