Arriving at Newcastle Falcons’ ground to watch the rugby only to find the car park was full gave us a fine opportunity for a chat on the walk to the stadium. I’m sure my son in law and I could have found somewhere closer but then we may not have got round to talking about AI.
So-called artificial intelligence has been the hot topic for a few months now and, no doubt, we will have similar conversations for many years to come. In some ways, the hype around large language models, such as ChatGPT, has died down. There is only so much that can be done with what, after all, is a tool that regurgitates existing content to create something that, at least initially, seems new.
I am still of the mind that what we think of as artificial intelligence is not. It is machine learning, a decision making tool, helping us to learn from mistakes and make better, quicker decisions. All well and good as long as the decisions are correct.
Humans are intelligent creatures. It is us that the programmers are trying to emulate, yet humans don’t learn from mistakes. We are caught in a perpetual cycle of repetition. We continue to do the same stupid things again and again. Will AI stop us from doing such things? I doubt it but rather it will help us to be more stupid even quicker.
Humans however move forward through trial and error. For every fantastic invention there are thousands of ideas that never see the light of day and, in the end, new discoveries are often made by accident. Our very evolution is dependent upon error in our biology, again some of which leads to success with most being discarded.
True artificial intelligence will make mistakes, will learn to deal with moral and ethical issues, will fall in love and cry for no apparent reason. These are aspects of human intelligence that are overlooked in the pursuit of AI.
We are a long way away from achieving anything like a real replication of human intelligence and we should stop worrying.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 