Jeff Bezos on AI (1998) [video]

Absolutely, AI is very rarely human in its failure modes, and often has novel and exciting failure modes instead.

But, on average… or so the marketing claims… it makes fewer mistakes.

For a while, it was possible to improve upon super-human chess AI by pairing them with a human; the combination was called a centaur. Eventually the AI got too good even for that as they stopped making the sorts of mistakes humans could spot, but in the meantime, even though they were superhuman, they had failure modes that we could help out with.

Let me put it this way: Humans are started with a single cell that eventually grows into an extraordinarily complex entity. If you look at new born babies, they have a capability of learning and exploring that we do not see in any artificial construct that we make.

Our artificial constructs have to be essential fully developed physically before we can then start the process of programming them. Humans have a capability to learn as they develop. We see this occur in all living things.

There is a fundamental insurmountable category difference here between living things and artificial constructs that we make.

Any appearance of understanding is based on the logic that we program into these artificial constructs. They cannot exceed what is programmed into them. Interestingly, living organisms can often exceed that. I think that all programmers should undertake a study of living things to gain a greater appreciation of what we do and just how simplistic are the things we do. That is a particular philosophical point of view that I hold.

I think that your appreciation of what we do and the constructs we create is not in accordance with reality. Not that this is particularly strange as far too many people have a much higher view of our technological prowess, especially when comparing to what has gone before. Starting from my undergraduate engineering days and the ongoing study of engineering and technological history, it has become quite clear that we are often today, quite ignorant of just how technologically advanced previous eras were in all sorts of different areas. There are plenty of research groups that are researching how previous generations were able to do things that we do not know how to do today.

> Does a human actually invent something or is it directly based on recorded knowledge?

Here, we do know that there is at least three ways that invention can arise. Logical progression on recorded knowledge, imagination as to how to solve a problem (thinking outside of the box), observation of the natural world around us.

> You're asking irrelevant questions.

For you to say that the questions I asked were irrelevant shows that you have limited yourself in your pursuit of knowledge and understanding.

> Humans do not create things out of thin air either.

When thinking outside of the box, they do. But I suspect that you may not appreciate this particular point.

> Humans also invent things by composing existing knowledge to form concepts.

As pointed out above, this is one mode of invention.

> The inventing that LLMs can do is equivalent in totality to our understanding of the word "invent"

Here, I disagree with you. But that is very likely to be a philosophical/metaphysical difference between us.

> Totally false. Not only are you wrong but experts in AI including the father of modern AI disagree with you completely and utterly.

Do you understand that you have devolved into a fallacious argument here? This is a seriously flawed fallacious argument on your part. The problem here is that your argument assumes that these [experts] you are referring to are correct, when you have not demonstrated that. Nor have they. There are many experts and others (all highly intelligent and talented people) who for all their intelligence and talent are just wrong. This has been shown to be the case many many times throughout the last century (let alone before that) when our understanding has changed because some little known person has come up with anew idea. One of the best examples here would be someone you would know of - Albert Einstein.

Now when you say

> If I copied your brain and replicated exactly that brain is "from human intelligence" but that copy of your brain is still an intelligence independent of it's origins and where it got it's knowledge.

Here, you have a problem. What is the difference between a living brain and a dead brain? In a single instant, we go from life to death and yet we don't know at this point in time what that difference is. There are lots of experiments being done today which are trying to study if there is a non-physical aspect to intelligence and free-will. Different experimenters in the same team have quite different interpretations of what the data means.

Do be so quick to assume that you know, when the researchers who study this can't agree.

> It's like you're eating your own logic. We also build intelligent systems called LLMs. Same concept.

Not at all. Intrinsically different and there is a vast categorical difference between children and our artificial constructs. From your comment, is it a valid assumption that you do not have children of your own or grandchildren of your own or even pets?

Let me ask a question, what is your background in building systems that augment human capability? If you have been involved in building LLM's, let me know.

I have been giving further thought to your responses and what I am seeing is that you hold a particular naturalistic epistemological worldview. This shows up with such statements as:

> Irrelevant. How something was created or formed is irrelevant to the intelligence it possesses.

> Wrong these things are not programmed. They are "trained" and fed information through a "learning" algorithm

and then you disagree with yourself while still keeping in the same naturalistic epistemological framework with

> False. Plants do not learn through any neural process. There are classes of invertebrate known to have nervous systems that do not learn. Jellyfish for example.

If you actually went back and looked at my discussion, I simply gave an example of chordate structures being beyond anything artificial constructs that we make. In addition, I did make the point that these artificial constructs had less intelligence than a single cell organism.

In regards to your saying that [How something was created or formed is irrelevant to the intelligence it possesses], you would have to show with fairly detailed evidence that this claim of yours has a possibility or is the best explanation for what you see.

You have not actually said anything as yet to support your conjectures and to have nullified my evidence for my claims. In fact, when I have asked you to answer some relatively simple questions, you dismissed them as irrelevant without providing any reasoning as to why those specific questions are irrelevant.

What is interesting is that your response to my question in relation to a living and dead brain you say:

> We do know the difference. In the process of dying, brain cells undergo a series of complex changes largely due to a decrease in the supply of essential nutrients and oxygen. As organs like the heart and lungs falter, the brain struggles to maintain its energy-intensive functions. Cells can no longer produce adequate levels of ATP, the molecule essential for energy, leading to an energy crisis within the brain.

But here we see you miss a very important condition. If what you say is true, then resuscitation would be impossible and we do have examples where resuscitation has occurred and occurring long after these processes would have started and in some cases have completed.

Now again you make a fallacious claim when you say:

> Researchers all agree.

Here you are arguing from the fallacy of authority and you are not at all demonstrating that this is the case for ALL researchers in this field.

It is interesting that you say of my arguments and position that:

> Invalid assumption. Not the first time your wrong. But proof your argument is highly fallible.

You make a claim and yet do not actually address any argument I make. The best you seem to be able to do is say something like:

> The failure in your intelligence is in viewing systems as a mechanistic hole. You lack the ability to see how the macro phenomena of life is the formation of physics equations of interacting atoms forming molecules, forming DNA, forming cells, forming neurons. We have equations for atomic physics, we know chemistry and we know how cells are built from atoms and chemistry and we that the brain is built from cells following the same chemistry.

Within the above comment, you make claim after claim and yet provide nothing of evidence to support that claim. I do understand that young people today are not taught how to present their position and arguments in a coherent manner. That particular facility was evident when I was passing through my undergraduate years 40 odd years ago.

Again, what you are showing us all is your particular naturalistic epistemology. You having that is not a problem, but you required to defend that position clearly and logically, which you are not doing.

Now, the other thing that is interesting her is that you make a very specific claim with:

> Instead you see magic you can't explain.

and in doing so, you have only demonstrated that by using the term [magic], you have placed yourself as being the [magic] believer. To discuss this would require an entire different forum. I do find it necessary to point this out to you.

You then claim:

> You've never even wondered about it, never even tried to think deeper to get to the bottom of it or the truth. You just see a little baby do something immensely clever and cute and emotion overwhelms your rationality. You are unable to see the true nature of things that children at the same time being things you love are also collections of atoms going through billions of chemical reactions a second forming this macro phenomenon called "life" and ultimately your kid.

and actually show me that it is you who has failed to think deeply the subject. There are so many questions that you have simply brushed away and you have allowed yourself to think shallowly about what you see. There are many many things that are being investigated by the methods of scientific investigation. The problem that is being found in all sorts of areas is that we see anomalies arising that cannot be explained by our current crop of theories and models. This is actually normal and the basic idea that we have to adjust to is that none of our theories or models is correct. They are all wrong.

The exciting part here is that with more data collected, we have the opportunity to see if there are better theories and models that explain what we see.

I have had a fascination with the electron. Interestingly, in the last hundred or so years, a variety of models have arisen which did not gain traction at the time. Yet today, these models have a possibility to explain what we do see better than the current crop of consensus models.

It is an exciting time to be alive as we can see the potential for breakthroughs in understanding and knowledge. Where we have to be careful is not to get caught up in the hype that does occur. Artificial Stupidity systems are one such area where the hype is extraordinary and the reality is actually being missed.

If you want to think that such systems are intelligent then do so. But you have an enormous uphill battle to prove that. I have thought of a number of questions for you to investigate, but as you have already shown me that you consider such questions as irrelevant, I won't put them before you.

Now as to the URL's you mentioned, the first gives a Cross-Site Scripting error (potential attack), so I won't follow that up.

The second URL to the Smithsonian Magazine, gives an example of data analysis of brain scans. Interesting but not at all to the level you imply with your comment:

> It goes to show how similar machine intelligence is to the human brain if it can partially interpret what moves through it.

In fact, the analysis, though very interesting does not show that it is due to machine intelligence. I have spent years analysing data, building analysis systems and having discussions with other people who are involved in machine learning. The intelligence exhibited is human and not machine. It boils down to something very simple, the only reason these systems exist is because we make them. They have not come about without human intelligence and they cannot progress without human intelligence directing that advancement.

I agree that such systems can be used to augment our abilities, but they don't replace us as our intellectual equals or masters. If we cede control to these unintelligent systems, we then bear the consequences of these systems failing. They will fail and spectacularly at that. If you have any practical engineering background, you will already know that.

So be of good cheer and watch carefully as things develop.

If it is or not, depends on the specific use of the transcription.

Consider "I went to Lenny's" being transcribed wrong by a human as "I went to Denny's" or by an AI as "Ivan to Lenny's".

Both are wrong, but if you get a human to check, we can be oblivious to the human mistake for the same reason it was made in the first place plus the effect where seeing text alters our perception of what we hear; the AI error being inhuman means we can spot it when the human error is imperceptible.