| There’s a few different ways one can look at it if trying to take lessons and ideas from Wittgenstein. I didn’t do a brilliant job of the thesis to be honest… but I got a few things on an intuitive level from trying to grok a bunch of Wittgenstein that left me feeling like there was a serious problem in our attempts to build an AI. One of them is that we only have language with which to build an AI - language and symbols. Yet these nevertheless capture absolutely nothing about what it is to perceive and understand, on a human level, so yeah. It’s kind of what Searle was getting at - symbolic outputs and translation based on rules doesn’t get you intelligence, even if it produces a system that looks as if it is intelligent. There’s also that we have an intersubjective attunement to others that is pre-linguistic. Ultimately “meaning is use” which is a pithy take on later Wittgenstein- there’s nothing in language which means anything at all. So it’s not that it wouldn’t be able to use language or concepts better than we do, it’s that we change with the AI and don’t accept them - particularly as they start to become uncanny or unpredictable. There really is something to sentience that we all know that cannot be reduced to language or machinery. Our language about machinery, and intelligent machinery, is full of usage mistakes and categorical errors that we overlook, but which are more serious when analysed. We are complete beings - my intelligence is part of a system, and it makes no sense to abstract it out of that system in order to nail it down. “Pain” cannot be reduced down to or captured in language. Suffering is part of our intelligence and we’d be nowhere without it. So ideas kind of like that and more. AGI would have to suffer to become general enough to warrant the use of the word general. |
Jo Cameron doesn't have general intelligence? This seems absurd. Intelligence is orthogonal to phenomenology and affective states. People aren't worried about AGI because it might have a Cartesian theater, the worry is that it might be more competent than humans and put humans out of a job. The semantics of whether it "truly" has intelligence is irrelevant.
>Suffering is part of our intelligence and we’d be nowhere without it.
It might be part of our intelligence, but why would it need to be part of machine's intelligence? GPT4 is already beating humans at theory of mind tasks[1], and I doubt that it suffers. Our suffering is an evolutionary stroke of bad luck. It has nothing to do with intelligence itself, and it would have been better if we had evolved some other way that didn't need it.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z