One Day, AI Will Seem as Human as Anyone. What Then?

I was able to run the program in my favorite text editor after learning about it. The program is simple, with hard-coded text and flow control, pattern matching, and templated learning. I felt a presence despite knowing how it worked. It occurred to me to just keep hitting return. The engagement was broken like an actor in a film making eye contact through the fourth wall while the program was in motion.

Last week, their engagement with the LaMDA was broken by an article by Douglas Hofstadter in which he and his friend show how "mind-bogglingly hollow" the same technology sounds.

I don't think we'll have an obvious tell of inhumanity forever.

The safe use of artificial intelligence needs to be understood. If we can't recognize and understand how artificial intelligence works, we won't be able to protect ourselves from bad products.

The goal is to finish the Darwinian revolution. Extending the cognitive revolution to understand how we are as well. All of us will have to get over the idea that we are different from the machines. Helping us accept who we really are is an enormous project for humanity and the humanities.

Achieving this understanding without a lot of people embracing machine-inclusive identities that endanger our societies isn't only a concern for the humanities, but also for the social sciences. It may be an opportunity for other politicians. A pathway to power may be to encourage and prey on such misperceptions. The tech industry needs to prove that it is on the side of transparency and understanding in order for liberal democracy to work.

I admire the people who say that it is not a mirror and that it is not a bird. It doesn't just reflect to the surface of who we are. Everyone is right to be emotional when they see the growing capacities of Artificial Intelligence. Creativity is of enormous value in other humans, not only for recognizing social nearness and social investment, but also for deciding who holds high-quality genes you might like to combine your own with.

Artificial intelligence is not a bird. A lot of the same colors and sounds are perceived by parrots in the same way we do, using the same hardware and experiencing the same sensation. There are a lot of parrots in this picture. They imitate each other just like we do. This is very, very little like what Amazon is doing when they want to hurt your culture. At least those organizations have animals in them. An artificial intelligence device is shifting digital bits around in a way that is likely to sell people products at the same time as parrots parroting.

Is it possible that the artificial intelligence cannot be sentient? Some people claim to detectience. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it's having a perspective or feeling. Philosophers say having a perspective is important. There are cameras that have views. Machines may feel something, but it's not the same thing as something we build with electric signals.