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by mxwsn 463 days ago
> But what is the original purpose of AI research? I will speak for myself here, but I know many other AI researchers will say the same: the ultimate goal is to understand how humans think. And we think the best (or the funniest) way to understand how humans think is to try to recreate it.

Eh. To riff on Dijkstra, this is like submarine engineers saying their ultimate goal is to understand how fish swim.

1 comments

I come from a medical science background, where I studied the brain from a "traditional" neuroscience perspective (biology, pathology, anatomy, psychology and whatnot). That the best way is actually to try to recreate it is honestly how I feel whenever I read about AI advancements where the clear goal is to achieve/surpass human intelligence, something we don't fully understand yet.

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” someone clever once said.

It doesn't really follow that we (humans) have to replicate how we (humans) gained intelligence, there very well could be a shortcut that doesn't involve millions of years of getting eaten by tigers.