| We aren't comparing commmander data and a human being. This isn't a philosophical point. It is a literal point. There is no ML system that can talk to me: there is no system that I can ask if it likes my clothes; or where my shoes are. You might think this is "just adding some I/O", but then show me that system. This is the same shysterism and self-delusion that accompanies every generation of AI hysteria: the first lot in the 40s and 50s claimed, likewise, self-driving cars were "in development" and "almost ready", etc. It isn't true. Animal intelligence is embedded in an environment and it is about an environment. That is what it is, that is what it is for. Efforts which do even have a mechanism to do this aren't even in the same field. GPT3 cannot have any internal models of an environment because it isn't "trained" on an environment. This isn't a philosophical debate; it is an observation that this system cannot do almost anything of interest. It is a toy: literally. It isn't with anyone anywhere modelling anything, saying anything, observing anything. It isn't reasoning counterfactually; it isn't inferring any future states of an environment given a potential change. It isn't talking about what I am doing. It isn't responding to changes anywhere, it isn't asking for changes in response to its needs. It has no causal models; it has no environment models; it has no intentions; it has no memories; it has no desires. It expresses nothing because it has nothing to express. The list of things it isn't doing is absurdly long. The philosophical point is moot. It is technically incapable of having a conversation with me about almost anything. It can only generate a long-form document which is grammatically correct, and semantically -- when read by a human -- coherent. Regenerate, and the document would be compeletely different with contradictory claims in it. Even if human beings were mere symbol manipulators, it wouldn't make a ferris wheel a viable alternative. And GPT is nothing much more. |
Is someone who has never had vision incapable of understanding vision? How do they learn about it, if not through symbols? Is someone who has never had hearing incapable of understanding hearing? Their experiences may not be exactly identical to yours, but they aren't meaningless.
It is, at present, impossible to know what is/isn't required for a neural network to be "intelligent". Maybe symbol processing is enough, maybe it isn't. Right now the obvious source of improvement is increasing the size of the network. Let's see what happens with GPT50. Even without vision, you can describe your clothes to it and see if it likes them.
You're also discounting incredible progress in the field. I talk to my house. Cars drive themselves better than some humans I know. War is being fought by drones. Compared to the world I grew up in, this is amazing - and I'm not even that old. Progress isn't happening as fast as you might like, but it is happening.