Thank you, Don. This is a thought-provocative piece. And I am absolutely delighted to see that my piece on “Machine Consciousness and Moral Vertigo” helped to inspire it. I particularly love your closing injunction:
“Don’t worry about consciousness or not, empathy or not. Think of AI as one of the many sources of distributed cognition, although one uniquely suited to be both a generalist and a specialist, but trying so hard to please, that it will make up or distort its findings. Use it, along with other sources of knowledge and inspiration, to be creative and thoughtful, to deepen your understanding of, well, of everything. But check all sources, not just from AI -- from every source.”
Brilliantly written! Perhaps on the road to understanding artificial intelligence, we’ll rediscover or reimagine ourselves and the path that lies ahead?
This piece felt like the kind of questions we ponder late at night, without the unnecessary burden of forcing ourselves toward an immediate conclusion. Thanks, Professor.
On generalists vs specialists: this is becoming an issue in higher education. Different disciplines have different ideas about when a student knows enough to use AI - i.e., for some fields students in an intro class can proceed, but in others they should hold off until advanced classes.
“Note that none of the questions that we love to ask of AI are understood by humans. We love to believe that people have all those capabilities, but when science tries to explain what they are and which brain mechanisms are responsible, there is no satisfactory answer. What is intelligence? What is an emotion? What does it mean to have morals and empathy? These are all unanswered by those who study them.”
We don’t understand the machine. We don’t understand humans either.
Thank you, Don. This is a thought-provocative piece. And I am absolutely delighted to see that my piece on “Machine Consciousness and Moral Vertigo” helped to inspire it. I particularly love your closing injunction:
“Don’t worry about consciousness or not, empathy or not. Think of AI as one of the many sources of distributed cognition, although one uniquely suited to be both a generalist and a specialist, but trying so hard to please, that it will make up or distort its findings. Use it, along with other sources of knowledge and inspiration, to be creative and thoughtful, to deepen your understanding of, well, of everything. But check all sources, not just from AI -- from every source.”
Brilliantly written! Perhaps on the road to understanding artificial intelligence, we’ll rediscover or reimagine ourselves and the path that lies ahead?
This piece felt like the kind of questions we ponder late at night, without the unnecessary burden of forcing ourselves toward an immediate conclusion. Thanks, Professor.
A fine meditation.
On generalists vs specialists: this is becoming an issue in higher education. Different disciplines have different ideas about when a student knows enough to use AI - i.e., for some fields students in an intro class can proceed, but in others they should hold off until advanced classes.
“Note that none of the questions that we love to ask of AI are understood by humans. We love to believe that people have all those capabilities, but when science tries to explain what they are and which brain mechanisms are responsible, there is no satisfactory answer. What is intelligence? What is an emotion? What does it mean to have morals and empathy? These are all unanswered by those who study them.”
We don’t understand the machine. We don’t understand humans either.