What is the value of a machine that is intelligent?
Nothing, unless it’s interested.
Cramming large-language models with text is no more valuable than giving them “yes” and “no” and a statistical model for working out the frequency of each answer.
Back to basics
The Turing Test is about fooling us.
The machine can’t be definitively identified as a machine — it’s fooled us. It’s played “the imitation game” successfully by imitating intelligence, not by being intelligent.
So the whole pursuit of artificial intelligence is the pursuit of the perfect fake, not the real thing.
Okay, got that.
The intuition game
But how are we defining intelligence here? It’s a commonplace in the discussion of ChatGPT and its friends that they come up with idiotic responses.
We can trust them to talk confidently and fluently, but not to make sense. Nor indeed to know what they’re talking about.
Intelligence is stupidity unless it understands itself and the context in which it’s active. The surveillance economy is not acting intelligently, for example, if my purchase of the second book in a series triggers a lot of energetic marketing for the first book.
Read the room, don’t miss the books
Ha! Books. I get occasional emails suggesting that I “might like to buy” books written by William Essex.
An intelligent intelligence would know why I haven’t felt the need to buy those books — despite their being so brilliantly wonderful and absolutely worth buying, of course.
How many more examples do I need here?
Uh, it kind of makes my point that the answer to that question is so obviously — none.
We know AI, don’t we?
The human factor
And while I’m on a roll here — communication is 55 per cent body language and 38 per cent tone of voice. If I’m face to face with somebody, they can read my mood. Beat that, Skynet!
I’m going to add: intelligence is mostly intuition and reading the room.
It’s interest. It’s curiosity.
It’s not lots of words cadged without permission from human writers (the best kind).
Baby steps
When an intelligence is born, not made, it lies in a cot being fed information by its parents.
Over time, it learns how to operate itself and it begins to explore its surroundings. Over more time, crucially, it becomes curious, and eventually, it learns to draw its own conclusions from its various inputs.
It learns independence. That’s a mark of intelligence.
Cue ominous music.
The development process of natural intelligence
Children learn from who their parents are, and how they behave, as well as from what they’re told and shown. They do the same with teachers, siblings, peer group, kindly aunt, weird uncle, et cetera.
After all, we may remember our teachers, but not what our teachers were trying to tell us.
Maybe the scientists currently shovelling Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Francoise Sagan, Gertrude Stein, Desmond Morris, Rachel Carson, Ayn Rand, Kurt Vonnegut, Kathy Acker and the Marquis de Sade into their pet projects should study this process.
Intelligence is the ongoing evolution of a subjective response to information, not the information itself.
It’s curiosity, and eventually, it’s answering back.
If we’re going to make it real, let’s make it kind.
Nothing, unless it’s interested.
Cramming large-language models with text is no more valuable than giving them “yes” and “no” and a statistical model for working out the frequency of each answer.
Back to basics
The Turing Test is about fooling us.
The machine can’t be definitively identified as a machine — it’s fooled us. It’s played “the imitation game” successfully by imitating intelligence, not by being intelligent.
So the whole pursuit of artificial intelligence is the pursuit of the perfect fake, not the real thing.
Okay, got that.
The intuition game
But how are we defining intelligence here? It’s a commonplace in the discussion of ChatGPT and its friends that they come up with idiotic responses.
We can trust them to talk confidently and fluently, but not to make sense. Nor indeed to know what they’re talking about.
Intelligence is stupidity unless it understands itself and the context in which it’s active. The surveillance economy is not acting intelligently, for example, if my purchase of the second book in a series triggers a lot of energetic marketing for the first book.
Read the room, don’t miss the books
Ha! Books. I get occasional emails suggesting that I “might like to buy” books written by William Essex.
An intelligent intelligence would know why I haven’t felt the need to buy those books — despite their being so brilliantly wonderful and absolutely worth buying, of course.
How many more examples do I need here?
Uh, it kind of makes my point that the answer to that question is so obviously — none.
We know AI, don’t we?
The human factor
And while I’m on a roll here — communication is 55 per cent body language and 38 per cent tone of voice. If I’m face to face with somebody, they can read my mood. Beat that, Skynet!
I’m going to add: intelligence is mostly intuition and reading the room.
It’s interest. It’s curiosity.
It’s not lots of words cadged without permission from human writers (the best kind).
Baby steps
When an intelligence is born, not made, it lies in a cot being fed information by its parents.
Over time, it learns how to operate itself and it begins to explore its surroundings. Over more time, crucially, it becomes curious, and eventually, it learns to draw its own conclusions from its various inputs.
It learns independence. That’s a mark of intelligence.
Cue ominous music.
The development process of natural intelligence
Children learn from who their parents are, and how they behave, as well as from what they’re told and shown. They do the same with teachers, siblings, peer group, kindly aunt, weird uncle, et cetera.
After all, we may remember our teachers, but not what our teachers were trying to tell us.
Maybe the scientists currently shovelling Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, Francoise Sagan, Gertrude Stein, Desmond Morris, Rachel Carson, Ayn Rand, Kurt Vonnegut, Kathy Acker and the Marquis de Sade into their pet projects should study this process.
Intelligence is the ongoing evolution of a subjective response to information, not the information itself.
It’s curiosity, and eventually, it’s answering back.
If we’re going to make it real, let’s make it kind.