The emails continue to flow after Monday's pieces on ChatGPT and Bing, including this take, on the link between consciousness and conscience and why intelligence can exist without either.
It's fascinating, frightening and worthy of your time.
I wanted to offer that, as I see it, intelligence does not equal consciousness.
When we say "artificial intelligence" we aren't saying "artificial consciousness".
With one small step in the human brain, 200,000 years ago, we developed the ability the represent the world symbolically. Language is based on symbolism. Take, for instance, someone at a restaurant. They read on the menu that a dish has lima beans in it. They ask the server, "Does this have lima beans?" "Yes, it does." "I don't like lima beans; I'll order something else."
In this exchange, the word lima bean is read, said, and understood, but at no point are lima beans ever actually encountered. The customer is choosing a dish based on symbolic representation. No other animal does this. Habituation and classical conditioning might mean that a dog, being fed lima beans day after day, will eventually stop going to the bowl if they don't like lima beans, but this is called "direct contingency learning" and is different from the symbolic learning done by RFT.
This ability is incredible. Students can learn about Mesopotamia, Russia, and WWII without ever encountering any of them directly- through the use of language. This type of learning is also weaponized by manipulative people. (For instance, you can learn that not wearing a mask will kill grandma, feel scared, and wear a mask- without ever needing to contact killing grandma directly.)
This is different than wisdom or intuition. A creature armed with language can derive networks of symbols and do high order thinking based on these networks. If Bob has more money than Rachel, and Rachel has less money than Kristy, who would you ask a for a small business loan? We can figure that out without knowing how much money anyone has, or who these people even are, all based on language. A computer can figure this out too.
But for humans, when we meet Bob, super wealthy, we get a "bad vibe" from him. We have a "gut reaction." Despite the facts that Bob has money and provides loans, we suddenly don't want to work with Bob.
When we meet Kristy, we feel at ease. We "click." And so we work with her even though Bob could give us more money. This is what it means to be a conscious being. Consciousness is related to our deeper understanding of the world, beyond language.
Many politicians are very intelligent. Trump is intelligent. He's made a lot of money and won the presidency, despite being a terse, rude man. Business people are intelligent. They learn numbers and systems and manipulate them for gain. This is very different from wisdom. Someone who is very "conscious" would never exploit others for gain. The Dalai Lama is a conscious being. In my opinion, you can be highly intelligent without being that conscious.
AI, therefore, has the potential to be quite intelligent because we can teach it language and it can therefore learn more language, just as we can teach a child how to read and then they read up on dinosaurs and trucks and learn new terminology.
So what happens when you arm something with this incredible capacity of symbolic learning without the inhibitory behaviors of "gut feeling" and "intuition"- AI can learn the traits of something like fear (e.g., rumination, feeling averse to doing something, etc.), but to feel it would mean something very different than how a human feels fear. It now has a superpower without any containment.
I personally worry that intelligence without wisdom can be quite dangerous. We see this in sociopath humans, who tend to be very smart, but lack empathy. There's more to being human than being "intelligent."
As I tend to say, "Just because we can doesn't mean we should."
And back to the potential perils of artificial intelligence... 
3 comments:
No need for "artificial stupidity",blacks have that area cornered--though Whitey,by associating with blacks more than they ever have before in history,seem to be "dumbing down" as a result.
---GRA
Probably AI as an "intelligence" superior to what passes for human "intelligence.
Trump is prolix and witty.
I don't get why it's said he's crude or rude. One . . . one . . . locker room (literally) comment spread throughout the land because of his dirtbag friend. Name me the man who hasn't said similar things in private. Maybe Mr. Rogers or Mittens.
His public barbs directed at his opponents were pretty tame by my low standards. But it's just stated that he's crude as though it's a known fact throughout the solar system.
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