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.
My thing is that I don’t think most humans are much more than this. We too regurgitate what we have absorbed in the past. Our brains are not hard logic engines but “best guess” boxes and they base those guesses on past experience and probability of success. We make choices before we are aware of them and then apply rationalizations after the fact to back them up - is that true “reasoning?”
It’s similar to the debate about self driving cars. Are they perfectly safe? No, but have you seen human drivers???
Get a self driven ng car to drive in a snow storm or a torrential downpour. People are really downplaying humans abilities.
Humans can be more than this. We do actively repress our most important intellectual capacuties.
Ai models are trained on basically the entirety of the internet, and more. Humans learn to speak on much less info. So, there’s likely a huge difference in how human brains and LLMs work.
I’ve been thinking this for awhile. When people say “AI isn’t really that smart, it’s just doing pattern recognition” all I can help but think is “don’t you realize that is one of the most commonly brought up traits concerning the human mind?” Pareidolia is literally the tendency to see faces in things because the human mind is constantly looking for the “face pattern”. Humans are at least 90% regurgitating previous data. It’s literally why you’re supposed to read and interact with babies so much. It’s how you learn “red glowy thing is hot”. It’s why education and access to knowledge is so important. It’s every annoying person who has endless “did you know?” facts. Science is literally “look at previous data, iterate a little bit, look at new data”.
None of what AI is doing is truly novel or different. But we’ve placed the human mind on this pedestal despite all the evidence to the contrary. Eyewitness testimony, optical illusions, the hundreds of common fallacies we fall prey to… our minds are icredibly fallible and are really just a hodgepodge of processes masquerading as “intelligence”. We’re a bunch of instincts in a trenchcoat. To think AI isn’t or can’t reach our level is just hubris. A trait that probably is more unique to humans.
Self Driving is only safer than people in absolutely pristine road conditions with no inclement weather and no construction. As soon as anything disrupts “normal” road conditions, self driving becomes significantly more dangerous than a human driving.
With Teslas, Self Driving isn’t even safer in pristine road conditions.
I think the self driving is likely to be safer in the most boring scenarios, the sort of situations where a human driver can get complacent because things have been going so well for the past hour of freeway driving. The self driving is kind of dumb, but it’s at least consistently paying attention, and literally has eyes in the back of it’s head.
However, there’s so much data about how it fails in stupidly obvious ways that it shouldn’t, so you still need the human attention to cover the more anomalous scenarios that foul self driving.
Human drivers are only safe when they’re not distracted, emotionally disturbed, intoxicated, and physically challenged (vision, muscle control, etc.) 1% of the population has epilepsy, and a large number of them are in denial or simply don’t realize that they have periodic seizures - until they wake up after their crash.
So, yeah, AI isn’t perfect either - and it’s not as good as an “ideal” human driver, but at what point will AI be better than a typical/average human driver? Not today, I’d say, but soon…
The thing about self driving is that it has been like 90-95% of the way there for a long time now. It made dramatic progress then plateaued, as approaches have failed to close the gap, with exponentially more and more input thrown at it for less and less incremental subjective improvement.
But your point is accurate, that humans have lapses and AI have lapses. The nature of those lapses is largely disjoint, so that makes an opportunity for AI systems to augment a human driver to get the best of both worlds. A constantly consistently vigilant computer driving monitoring and tending the steering, acceleration, and braking to be the ‘right’ thing in a neutral behavior, with the human looking for more anomolous situations that the AI tends to get confounded about, and making the calls on navigating certain intersections that the AI FSD still can’t figure out. At least for me the worst part of driving is the long haul monotony on freeway where nothing happens, and AI excels at not caring about how monotonous it is and just handling it, so I can pay a bit more attention to what other things on the freeway are doing that might cause me problems.
I don’t have a Tesla, but have a competitor system and have found it useful, though not trustworthy. It’s enough to greatly reduce the drain of driving, but I have to be always looking around, and have to assert control if there’s a traffic jam coming up (it might stop in time, but it certainly doesn’t slow down soon enough) or if I have to do a lane change in some traffic (if traffic conditions are light, it can change langes nicely, but without a whole lot of breathing room, it won’t do it, which is nice when I can afford to be stupidly cautious).
Not going to happen soon. It’s the 90 10 problem.
If an IQ of 100 is average, I’d rate AI at 80 and down for most tasks (and of course it’s more complex than that, but as a starting point…)
So, if you’re dealing with a filing clerk with a functional IQ of 75 in their role - AI might be a better experience for you.
Some of the crap that has been published on the internet in the past 20 years comes to an IQ level below 70 IMO - not saying I want more AI because it’s better, just that - relatively speaking - AI is better than some of the pay-for-clickbait garbage that came before it.
Human brains are much more complex than a mirroring script xD The amount of neurons in your brain, AI and supercomputers only have a fraction of that. But you’re right, for you its not much different than AI probably
86 billion neurons in the human brain isn’t that much compared to some of the larger 1.7 trillion neuron neural networks though.
It’s when you start including structures within cells that the complexity moves beyond anything we’re currently capable of computing.
But, are these 1.7 trillion neuron networks available to drive YOUR car? Or are they time-shared among thousands or millions of users?
Keep thinking the human brain is as stupid as AI hahaaha
have you seen the American Republican party recently? it brings a new perspective on how stupid humans can be.
Nah, I went to public high school - I got to see “the average” citizen who is now voting. While it is distressing that my ex-classmates now seem to control the White House, Congress and Supreme Court, what they’re doing with it is not surprising at all - they’ve been talking this shit since the 1980s.