We are on track to potentially learn there's no deep mysterious secret to human cognition. If and when we crack that, this planet will experience the technological singularity.
I thought the singularity was a crackpot idea not much different from string theory in how it tries to sell itself. We were stuck in the post WWII, post globalization, smartphone incrementalism age. Now we're moving on to something exciting again.
What I'm getting at is that you'll not only see more articles like this, but that collectively as a species we're going to start feeling a whole lot less special.
> collectively as a species we're going to start feeling a whole lot less special.
If that's the case, expect a massive backlash from the spiritual types, which basically means every other person. The centrality of man is essential to the abrahamic religions that dominate the planet, and other ones too will struggle to come to terms with seeing ghosts in the machine. I suspect organized religions will find ways to officially ostracize Machine Learning over the next decade. They'll form an alliance with people whose jobs are threatened, and pass laws to smother or ban research and deployment.
I am not a believer in an "AI revolution" or singularity, I think they're still one step up from parlor tricks, and anyway the world can evolve as fast as it can devolve (a nuke or two and we're in the ancient world again), but it feels inevitable that we're going to experience some significant neoluddite movement very, very soon.
> The centrality of man is essential to the abrahamic religions that dominate the planet
Do they really dominate? They're big and all, but both economically (and to an even greater extent by population) China + Japan + India are also pretty substantial, and not predominantly Abrahamic. And even in the west, religiosity is in decline.
> inevitable that we're going to experience some significant neoluddite movement very, very soon.
Absolutely agree, the discourse from those artists who vehemently dislike AI art speaks to this.
How powerful they are, I do not know. But they are there, they don't like what they see, and they have already turned the counter-arguments into bingo cards.
> I am not a believer in an "AI revolution" or singularity
Check back in 12 months.
I bet my entire life -- not just the sum total of my earnings -- that this the moment humans duplicate the spark that makes us who we are. And from there, God only knows what is possible.
The problem is that we don't even know what might be there to understand. Since it is pretty much unknown how humans think (from a brain processing perspective), we also don't really know if the things we see in LLMs are just dumber versions of human thought processes or if they are qualitatively different.
LLMs literally can’t compute any complex algorithm, they can’t simulate different steps in chess to get which version is best, nor execute some non-trivial algorithm.
They are nowhere near close to human intelligence.
We also have a good idea of how individual neurons work, but struggle a lot with understanding brains. Both LLMs and human brains have a lot of emergent behavior, which is why our understanding the low-level primitives only provides very limited insight.
What a blinder of an specious insight.
We don't even understand scaled up LLM let alone brains to make a meaningful inferences here.
It's also a disingenuous title for the linked article.