| > Does a calculator truly understand math when it spits out a correct answer? Of course not. And it doesn't matter. It starts to matter the moment we teach people at large to call calculators "Artificial Math Professor", projecting the image that they do indeed comprehend mathematics at a higher level. It starts to matter when I meet my aunt (a psychiatrist no less) for lunch and she is absolutely convinced that there is a conscious, intelligent entity living inside her calculator, and she wants to debate the ethics of this with me, getting angry and upset when I doubt the premise. It starts to matter when I turn on the TV later that day and see our countries minister of education in a panel discussion, debating the future of our schools when AMPs will teach math to our kids instead of flawed, human teachers. It starts to matter when our government starts debating new laws about "spreading dis-calculation" on social media, convinced that we can just let AMPs read and comprehend all those maths posts in real-time, reporting them to higher authority for posting wrong-calc, deciding on human lives in full-auto-mode. It starts to matter when I discuss the above with my mother (a lawyer) over lunch and she doesn't understand what the problem is either, convinced that we actually have flawless AMPs that can do all of this, baffled that I, supposedly a "tech guy", am opposed to legislative decisions ushering in new, fancy hype tech. It starts to matter when this is brought up on places like HN and people with a level of actual technological knowledge, possibly involved in some of this, fail to see the consequences and instead focus on high concept, philosophical debates about what really constitutes a "math professor", constantly moving goal posts around, hooked on their their own hype, rather than marveling the wondrous new technologies of the last years, but for what they actually are. For people at large, a computer has always been a magic black box that they anthropomorphized anyway. When marketing starts using fancy SciFi words, re-defining their actual meaning to stir up hype, people happily go with the literal meaning of what they are told (as intended; hence the hype). They are absolutely willing to believe that we indeed trapped a Math Professor in a box, Max Headroom style. Some of the people happen to be in places were they can make decisions, and that's when it really starts to matter. |