We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

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(archive.ph)

I’ve taken to calling it Automated Inference

I think you're misunderstanding the point the author is making. He is arguing that even the current state is not intelligent, it is merely a fancy autocorrect, it doesn't know or understand anything about the prompts it receives. As the author stated, it can only guess at the next statistically most likely piece of information based on the data that has been fed into it. That's not intelligence.

I think you're misunderstanding the point the author is making. He is arguing that even the current state is not intelligent, it is merely a fancy autocorrect, it doesn't know or understand anything about the prompts it receives. As the author stated, it can only guess at the next statistically most likely piece of information based on the data that has been fed into it. That's not intelligence.

I've never been fooled by their claims of it being intelligent.

Its basically an overly complicated series of if/then statements that try to guess the next series of inputs.

We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

archive.ph

(archive.ph)

Another article written by a person who doesn't realize that human intelligence is 100% about predicting sequences of things (including words), and therefore has only the most nebulous idea of how to tell the difference between an LLM and a person.

The result is a lot of uninformed flailing and some pithy statements. You can predict how the article is going to go just from the headline because it's the same article you already read countless times.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure.

May as well have written "Durrrrrrrrrrrrrrr brghlgbhfblrghl." It didn't even occur to the author to ask, "what is thinking? what is reasoning?" The point was to write another junk article to get ad views. There is nothing of substance in it.

How is outputting things based on things it has learned any different to what humans do?

Humans are not probabilistic, predictive chat models. If you think reasoning is taking a series of inputs, and then echoing the most common of those as output then you mustn't reason well or often.

If you were born during the first industrial revolution, then you'd think the mind was a complicated machine. People seem to always anthropomorphize inventions of the era.

Wow. So when you typed that comment you were just predicting which words would be normal in this situation? Interesting delusion, but that's not how people think. We apply reasoning processes to the situation, formulate ideas about it, and then create a series of words that express our ideas. But our ideas exist on their own, even if we never end up putting them into words or actions. That's how organic intelligence differs from a Large Language Model.

No it’s really not at all the same. Humans don’t think according to the probabilities of what is the likely best next word.

Yes, and that is precisely what you have done in your response.

You saw something you disagreed with, as did I. You felt an impulse to argue about it, as did I. You predicted the right series of words to convey the are argument, and then typed them, as did I.

There is no deep thought to what either of us has done here. We have in fact both performed as little rigorous thought as necessary, instead relying on experience from seeing other people do the same thing, because that is vastly more efficient than doing a full philosophical disassembly of every last thing we converse about.

That disassembly is expensive. Not only does it take time, but it puts us at risk of having to reevaluate notions that we're comfortable with, and would rather not revisit. I look at what you've written, and I see no sign of a mind that is in a state suitable for that. Your words are defensive ("delusion") rather than curious, so how can you have a discussion that is intellectual, rather than merely pretending to be?

The thing is, ai is compression of intelligence but not intelligence itself. That's the part that confuses people.
Ai is the ability to put anything describable into a compressed zip.

it doesn’t know or understand

But that's not what intelligence is, that's what consciousness is.
Intelligence is not understanding shit, it's the ability to for instance solve a problem, so a frigging calculator has a tiny degree of intelligence, but not enough for us to call it AI.
There is simply zero doubt an AI is intelligent, claiming otherwise just shows people don't know the difference between intelligence and consciousness.

Passing an exam is a form of intelligence.
Can a good AI pass a basic exam?
YES.
Does passing an exam require consciousness?
NO.
Because an exam tests abilities of intelligence, not level of consciousness.

it can only guess at the next statistically most likely piece of information based on the data that has been fed into it. That’s not intelligence.

Except we do the exact same thing! Based on prior experience (learning) we choose what we find to be the most likely answer. And that is indeed intelligence.

Current AI does not have the reasoning abilities we have yet, but they are not completely without it, and it's a subject that is currently worked on and improved. So current AI is actually a pretty high form of intelligence. And can sometimes out compete average humans in certain areas.

How is outputting things based on things it has learned any different to what humans do?

Humans are not probabilistic, predictive chat models. If you think reasoning is taking a series of inputs, and then echoing the most common of those as output then you mustn't reason well or often.

If you were born during the first industrial revolution, then you'd think the mind was a complicated machine. People seem to always anthropomorphize inventions of the era.

Good luck. Even David Attenborrough can't help but anthropomorphize. People will feel sorry for a picture of a dot separated from a cluster of other dots.
The play by AI companies is that it's human nature for us to want to give just about every damn thing human qualities.
I'd explain more but as I write this my smoke alarm is beeping a low battery warning, and I need to go put the poor dear out of its misery.

We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

archive.ph

(archive.ph)

In that case let's stop calling it ai, because it isn't and use it's correct abbreviation: llm.

I think you meant compression. This is exactly how I prefer to describe it, except I also mention lossy compression for those that would understand what that means.

And yet, paradoxically, it is far more intelligent than those people who think it is intelligent.

We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

archive.ph

(archive.ph)