“The more you listen to Silicon Valley’s discourse around AI, the more you hear echoes of religion. That’s because a lot of the excitement about building a superintelligent machine comes down to recycled religious ideas. Most secular technologists who are building AI just don’t recognize that.”
But they aren’t building intelligence. They are creating code that uses the intelligence of the human actor to fool them into believing they are having a conversation.
You cannot create an AGI (artificial general intelligence) using the foundation of current “AI”. The two are totally different. Generative text is just that — it’s not smart, not creative, not intelligent.
This is like saying you will build a spaceship off the foundations of a tricycle. Never mind the fact that there is no getting there from here, these bozos are CONVINCED they are both transportation and thus similar enough.
It is a ridiculous belief.
And that IS religion.
In my Masters in Computer Science I took a small innocuous course that turned into a mental hell. One question was “is computer science a science or is it just the application of technology” which was a good question and 45 years later one I still struggle to answer.
I would like to think that it is science but the definition of science doesn’t really help:
Computers are hardly part of the natural world — they are manmade creations using man derived algorithms.
It is like making something up and then calling it a science because thousands believe in it — like astrology (apologies to those who believe in astrology).
I am loathe to call myself a scientist (I’m married to a scientist). But a technologist rings hollow.
Software engineer (or engineer as I also do hardware engineering) is my preference. YMMV
@feloneouscat great post and question. I would be on the side of "applied technology".
“‘The intertwining of religion and technology is centuries old, despite the people who’ll tell you that science is value-neutral and divorced from things like religion,’ said Robert Geraci, a professor of religious studies”
Geraci makes a fundamental flaw: science ≠ technology. Science is value neutral. Technology (usage of science) may not be. Einstein was a scientist. Oppenheimer was a scientist became a technologist.