Intelligence and Motivation
Why do anything?
I like ChatGPT. It's an amazing tool. I think it's a misnomer to call it an Artificial Intelligence. It has no motivation. Unless a person asks it a question it just sits there. It doesn't want to do anything.
Animals are motivated.
The most basic motivation might be an amoeba swimming up a chemical gradient towards food.
When I was a kid I used to like watching frogs. They aren't very smart but are very lively. They don't just sit on a lily pad all day.
So I'd place motivation as a more fundamental cognitive ability than intelligence.
And ChatGPT has no motivation.
The science fiction I've read about an AI taking over the world assumes the AI has some sort of motivation.
The idea is that once a certain level of "intelligence" is attained, motivation would emerge.
Perhaps this has it backwards. Once we make a machine that is motivated, then intelligence will emerge.
For instance, if we send probes to other stars the probe would need to be autonomous and motivated. Something like ChatGPT would be part of the system. The system as a whole would be intelligent.
People are motivated. We use tools to enhance our capabilities.
Some tools, like the internet, greatly enhance our effective intelligence.
Generative systems like ChatGPT can help with that People who are skilled at using it have an advantage over others for lots of tasks.
But say I use it to write code. The code may work but I miss out on the actual practice of coding. And I can easily end up with code that I don't understand.
I ran into that long ago when I was first learning to write websites. I tried using a Microsoft applicaton that supposedly made it easy. And it worked but the html it generated was almost impossible for a human to read. Now I write websites in a text editor and am practiced and can make pages from scratch faster than I could using a content management system that is itself hard to use.
I've thought of Google as an AI. It has motivation. It wants to probe and catalogue the internet. Google is sort of a symbiont; it enhances the capabilities of the people who provide it's motivation.
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.