Sadly, for me this is behind a paywall (I'm not paying outlets so I can read their opinion pages. I don't mind them charging for it, I'm just not paying for it.)“True intelligence is demonstrated in the ability to think and express improbable but insightful things. True intelligence is also capable of moral thinking."
— @judgeluttig (@judgeluttig) March 8, 2023
This is all I can see of the argument, but it's a fascinating one."This means constraining the otherwise limitless creativity of our minds with a set of ethical principles that determines what ought and ought not to be (and of course subjecting those principles themselves to creative criticism)”
— @judgeluttig (@judgeluttig) March 8, 2023
As I've said before, ChatGPT doesn't "think," it just works on pattern recognition little different from my iPhone that provides words to me when I'm typing out texts or blog posts. It's convenient because a virtual keyboard is a bitch for large fingers, and typing contractions is a real pain (you have to toggle keyboards, which is no fun at all). I especially like the idea that "True intelligence is capable of moral thinking."
Moral thinking is a rather complex subject (made childish by silly things like the "trolley problem." Wittgenstein once spoke of philosophy as a fly in a bottle that couldn't find its way out again. That's the category of the "trolley problem," IMHO. Cleverness (on a school-boy level) for its own sake, and nothing more. Like the "God paradoxes": "Can God make a rock so big God can't lift it?", and its variants. Feh.) I would venture a thought that moral thinking requires a social sense, the kind human beings have as social creatures (we don't have any instincts as that term is properly understood, so don't chime in that morality is "instinctual" or even being social animal is instinctual.) I'm convinced, from being around dogs however briefly, that some behaviors (like humans being social animals) is genetic. My daughter's young dog is a herding breed. He displays this by coming into our home and running through the house, excitedly, to be sure he knows who's in the "herd." When someone leaves, he's a bit upset the "herd" is diminished and someone is out of his sight/control. My daughter didn't teach him this.
So I won't even venture out into the deep waters of what "moral thinking" constitutes, except to point out, neither will the advocates of AI. At least not the ones who think AI is what they've seen in movies and science fiction, rather than the ones who know what AI actually is. Well, and the ones who study human thinking.
Which is not to say Noam Chomsky is the last word on human thinking. I know when I was in college transformational grammar was the last word on language and so, in Western philosophy anyway, a powerful word on human thought as a subject of examination. That's faded now, which is as it should be. Still, I'd be interested to read fully Chomsky & Co.'s critique.
I actually woke up this morning (yeah, I have weird mornings. It's a very strange place, my mind.) thinking about the desire from some to "create" AI, in the science fiction sense anyway. Humans want themselves to be the "Creator." Something Mary Shelley touched on over 200 years ago; but will we persist in making something we can claim is a result of our efforts alone (children don't suffice). Well, some of us do, anyway. I'm not quite sure what the root of that is, but it does seem to be the desire to be Man the Creator. I don't really think Frankenstein is a particular warning on that (more of a moral warning, actually, which is ironic), because even that novel requires magic (dressed up as alchemy; the electricity stuff is from the movies 100 years later) to perform the miracle. Which means we're really no closer now than we were then, and we're not going to get closer, probably at all.
We need a Godel's theorem for this, I think. Or maybe just realize most people really have no clue what intelligence, much less articifical intelligence, is. It really does all come down to definitions, doesn't it?
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