| This is a terribly ignorant take and disappointing to see coming from a science fiction author. > AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord. This is just argument by assertion. We have no good definition of intelligence, so I have no clue how he can be so confident. "Machine learning doesn't learn" is a crazy take, since "backprop + gradient descent does learn" is close to the most well-supported thing you can say about the past few years of algorithmic progress. > sophisticated autocomplete Aside from this being an incredibly reductive sneer that clearly isn't true if you've honestly tried using ChatGPT, etc., his citation for this is a podcast, which I'm positive Doctorow would not accept as sufficient for basically any other technical topic. I love Ted Chiang's stories, and some of his takes on AI progress are cited here. However, I also found his extensive conversation with the Financial Times (earlier this month, so published after this) disappointing along similar lines. The thread running through both of these is a complete lack of a positive vision for the future, replaced by an almost smug cynicism that asserts any more technological progress is simply hype, a grift, and bad. Are there any current science fiction authors with a positive vision of the future? |
Without concrete definitions your assertions are just as correct as theirs. But they have the evidence of absurd tech-bro hype of past technologies to draw on.
> I love Ted Chiang's stories, and some of his takes on AI progress are cited here. However, I also found his extensive conversation with the Financial Times (earlier this month, so published after this) disappointing along similar lines.
"I love Ted Chiang's stories because they jive with my preconceived notions, but I like him less when he says things that I don't believe"
> The thread running through both of these is a complete lack of a positive vision for the future, replaced by an almost smug cynicism that asserts any more technological progress is simply hype, a grift, and bad. Are there any current science fiction authors with a positive vision of the future?
Plenty. They talked about flying cars and living on the moon. Instead we got stagnant wages and a social-media skinner box. All of those wonderfully positive predictions didn't pan out.