AI: evolution is making us treat it like a human, and we need to kick the habit

Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$ds_changed in eval() (line 16 of /var/www/7/modules/php/php.module(80) : eval()'d code).
Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$ss_search_api_url in eval() (line 20 of /var/www/7/modules/php/php.module(80) : eval()'d code).
Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$tm_title in eval() (line 20 of /var/www/7/modules/php/php.module(80) : eval()'d code).

His fear is that AI will one day succeed in “manipulating people to do what it wants”.

Metadata

Provider:

URL:

Retrieved on:

Tuesday, May 16, 2023

Information

Tags:

Summary

Key Points:

His fear is that AI will one day succeed in “manipulating people to do what it wants”.
In a recent essay, the US psychologist Gary Marcus advised us to stop treating AI models like people.
Marcus is correct to say we should stop treating AI like people - conscious moral agents with interests, hopes and desires.

This means that while ChatGPT can produce paragraphs filled with emotive language, it doesn’t understand any word in any sentence it generates.
The LLM designers successfully turned the problem of semantics – the arrangement of words to create meaning – into statistics, matching words based on their frequency of prior use.
The cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett coined the phrase “competence without comprehension”, which perfectly captures the insights of Darwin and Turing.

Our evolutionary history has furnished us with mechanisms that predispose us to find intentions and agency everywhere.
With the potential disruption that LLMs can cause, we must realise they are simply probabilistic machines with no intentions, or concerns for humans.
However, we are simply seeing a scaling up of “competence”, but still no “comprehension” (in the sense of Dennett) and definitely no intentions – just pattern matching.

We could easily envisage an unscrupulous regime or multinational deploying an AI, trained on fake news and falsehoods, to flood public discourse with misinformation and deep fakes.
Fraudsters could also use an AI to prey on vulnerable people in financial scams.
Marcus has also called for a an international agency to promote safe, secure and peaceful AI technologies" - dubbing it a “Cern for AI”.