640 KB ought to be enough for everybody
Bill Gates
If history of proclamations are to teach us something, it is that, at the peak of their intellect, most intellectuals fail to make the right predictions. Famous example, above!
Having said that, the last few weeks, I have encountered articles where commentary has been made by eminent intellectuals (people I admire and respect) make proclamations about Machine Learning, Deep neural nets and similar (GPT-3, DALE-E, etc).
Noam Chomsky on GPT-3 and Douglas Hofstadter have both made proclamations about ML.
And those are in the same breath as saying, heck, this is just a dumb machine taking advantage of a statistical anomaly / statistical fact and there is no real consciousness or intelligence behind it.
And I am in agreement with them. Thus far. But, I am also now a little excited / nervous because, I have an intuition that just like Bill Gates’ claim of 640 KB being enough for each human’s ‘needs’, these are also very quick remarks.
What if we humans, who claim to be conscious and intelligent are ourselves just a statistical anomaly. What is it to say, that we didn’t emerge (our intelligence, that we so value), out of iterations (millions, maybe billions) of statistical fine-tuning.
So, I’m looking forward to the machines gaining consciousness!