Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by alex_duf 1244 days ago
>I can accept a system such as ChatGPT synthesizing from data it sucked in, making educated guesses and so on

On that note I find it interesting that this has sometimes been an argument to dismiss chatGPT as "non intelligent". What are we if not statistical machines, synthesizing from the data we've sucked in over our lifetime?

2 comments

I certainly can't see us humans as anything other than that. But if that's true, us human machines seem to have a large number of "low level programs" running in the background that serve to blur the boundary between us and the machines we build and help us to elevate ourselves to a special typing in the universe that very well may not exist.

I feel I think too much about mundane things and sometimes about wondrously confusing things often to my detriment. And at least a few times a week I would swear I run into a person with the opposite problem. Their behavior, choices, preferences. Their thought processes (at least what they share with me) come off as closer to machine than human.

Something in my gut tells me we are more similar to some of the things we build than we might care to admit.

> What are we if not statistical machines, synthesizing from the data we've sucked in over our lifetime?

Reasoning machines who are actually pretty bad at statistics.

Reasoning and statistical machines who are actually pretty bad at both.
We are heuristical which may not be logical, but it makes sense from an organism perspective.

For example since the world is uncertain and chaotic we seek either to conserve or expend for future gains. This can explain many stock trading behavior, despite often being a non optimal viewpoint