| Before I spent a few hours of my life getting a basic grip of statistics, I fully expected to one day in the near future being wiped out (along with the rest of humanity) by a newly awakened artificial consciousness that came to the correct conclusion, that humans are the biggest threat to all other life on earth, including its own. Then I learned about Bayesian statistics and watched a talk by a senior LLNL statistician who is actually marketing 'AI' products/services as a side gig. When I realized what 'deep learning' actually is I was disappointed, unsure if I had mistakenly oversimplified the subject matter - until said senior statistician spelled out loud what I was thinking, in her talk: the 'understanding' a machine can currently attain of its input is quite like the understanding a pocket calculator can achieve of maths. Guess humanity is off the hook for now. Phew. I have doubts whether 'strong AI' is even technologically possible, since even accurately simulating a human mind, this simulation would be necessarily constrained to run orders of magnitude slower than the reality it is designed to model. 'Training' it with data so to allow it the opportunity to reason and thereby synthesize a conclusion not already contained in the data fed to it might take longer than a researcher would be able to in a life time. When was the last time a generation-spanning endeavour worked out as planned for (the West)? I wish people would stop calling what currently passes for 'Machine Learning' as 'AI'. Literally the same level of 'intelligence' we already had in the 80s, AFAIR we called it 'Fuzzy Logic' then. Secretly an admission, that Hollywood basically licensed the narrative of imminent runaway artificial consciousness back to science would make me give it one final Chance to prove its aptitude at high-level human reasoning and get square with reality. I'm not holding my breath. |