I don’t often pride myself on getting it right. I don’t think there is any value in taking wild ass guesses based on limited information. And yet, I remember when, way back in 2002, a friend told me about Ray Kurzweil and I immedaitely laughed the man off. His confident belief that he would live forever because ‘the age of spiritual machines is nigh’ seemed to me to be little more than a masked fear of dying, and I imagined that somewhere in Brooklyn there must be a very dissapointed rabbi.
And now we live in the age of ‘AI,’ which seems to be little more than a weird toy that is shattering human epistemology. The current AI epidemic is currently at what I hope is its fucking nadir, and the Kurzweilian beleif seems stronger than ever, so much so that my proclamation has me watchning the clock. If the previous sentences didn’t make it obvious, despite the wonder that is Sora2, I am still skeptical of AI.
So I have been reading a lot of books on the subject. Larson’s book was very good for this end. It is a very well detailed look at what is going on under the hood of AI and an explanation as to why the author thinks we are very very far away from it right now. It explains what human intelligence is, the distinction between deductive reasoniing an dinductive reasoning (why humans need both and which the AI is actually capable of), and most facinating to me, how human computer scientist are creating AI’s to begin with (they aren’t).
One can still be skeptical of AI without truly understanding what the fuck is gong on. This is because no one know how they work really. AI’s are a product of the machine learning process, where a program in instructed to create AI’s, and no one really understand what is under the hood.
I thought this was a terrific read, but obviously it reinforced the ideas I already had. We will just have to see what the future holds, but I am confident I got this one right.
Failures in Polymathy 