There's definitely a few echo chambers around AI, but it's definitely not something that "just techies" are onto. ChatGPT made some waves at the end of last year. My in-laws were wanting to talk to (at) me about it at Christmas. There's plenty of awareness outside of the tech circles, but most of the discussion (both out and in of the tech world) seems to miss what LLMs actually _are_. The reason why ChatGPT was impr…
Conflating intelligence and awareness seems to me the biggest confusion around this topic.
When non-technical people ask me about it, I ask them to consider three questions:
- is alive?
- thinks?
- can speak (and understand)?
A plant, microbe, primitive animals... are alive, don't think, can't speak.
A dog, a monkey... are alive, think, can't speak.
A human is alive, thinks, can speak.
These things aren't alive, think, can speak.
I know some of the above will be controversial, but clicks for most people, that agree: if you have a dog, you know what I mean whith "a dog thinks". Not with words, but they're capable intricate reasoning and strategies.
Intelligence can be mechanical, the same as force. For a man from the ancient times, the concept of an engine would have been weird. Only live beings were thought to move on their own. When a physical process manifested complex behaviour, they said that a spirit was behind it.
Intelligence doesn't need awareness. You can have disembodied pieces of intelligence. That's what Google, Facebook, etc. have been doing for a long time. They're AI companies.
It doesn't help with the confusion that speaking is a harder condition than thinking and thinking seems to be harder than being alive: "these things aren't alive so they can't think" but they speak, so...