Unlike GOFAI (“Good Old-Fashioned AI”), modern AI doesn’t seem like an invention at all, let alone one embodied by the behavior of a “machine.” The word we’re looking for is discovery. To the extent things like racks full of GPUs and PyTorch shuffling data around constitute a “machine” in the picture, they are like the Webb telescope; instruments of discovery rather than engines of production. “Machines” that let us peer incredibly deeply into extraordinarily large piles of data.
Unlike traditional photography, which killed a whole world of tedious photorealistic painting, but like the Webb telescope, “data photography” reveals worlds within worlds we’ve never even suspected existed, let alone been able to see, in piles of data too large for us to ever hold in our heads.
We might well encounter singularity phenomena as computational power aggregates in specific high-density ways, but to identify such phenomena with the emergence of “superintelligence” (an anthropomorphic extrapolation of the self-important conceits of a particular lump of organic matter) is about as coherent as calling a black hole “God.”
There is a common human tendency here incidentally. When we discover scary new things, we try to think of them as inventions first because inventions seem to embody a contingent optionality and afford us more agency than discoveries. It feels like we don’t have to use them if we don’t like them, and that we have some sort of god-like creator-agency over their very existence.
want to close with the seed of a thought, as yet very incomplete, about how humans fit into all this. I’ve repeatedly brought up the importance of embodiment and “depth of field” in perceiving reality (see Beyond Hyperanthropomorphism). That’s my point of departure for what I’m thinking now. I’m starting to think that the importance of being human lies in having a particular sort of “caring field” in space/time/matter. We can define what humans care about in almost a mechanical way
With apologies to Descartes: We care therefore we are. The interesting question now is, how can we continue to do that, now that we’ve discovered how to see computational realities that we cannot unsee. Can we still care? Can we still be?
