The Artificial Intelligentsia

How about the brain creates information from constant interaction with the world based on the kinds of bodies we have and our needs/wants? This information doesn't exist as information until the brain creates it. Information is the product of minds. It doesn't exist in the world on it's own to be processed. As such, the brain is something other than a computing device. Computers exist because we figured out how to arrange physical systems to process information that's meaningful to us. But to nature, it's just a physical system (and not even that, since physics is a model of nature we create).

That's Jaron Lanier's paraphrased argument against thinking of the brain as a computer. To say that information exists in the world to be processed is to make a metaphysical commitment that information exists ready made for us.

> and there being something magical about human brains that cannot be simulated

It doesn't have to be magical. There are different philosophical views on the world and the mind which lead to different conclusions. If one takes the hard problem of consciousness seriously, then consciousness cannot be computed. Not because of magic or the supernatural, but just because consciousness is not computable, since computation is itself an abstraction (Turing machines don't exist on their own anymore than do any other mathematical systems). Unless your metaphysics falls along the lines of Tegmark, Plato or Wheeler (it from bit).

Instead you can think of The brain as an information creator. We give meaning to the world. We build models. The world itself just is, it's not information, math, physics or symbols.

Playing a game with fixed rules and a finite set of potential states is something a computer can do.

Designing the computer that does that is intelligent.

There is no connection between the two and one does not lead to the other.

The fact that some of the people developing 'artificial intelligence' have such a limited understanding of what intelligence is no doubt contributes to the mocking tone of some critics.

Yes, but I don't think you are, either.

The fact is that chess and Go abilities aside, we are probably not even close to insect-level intelligence, and we don't have a clear path of getting there soon -- let-alone anything human-level. Current state-of-the-art so-called AI is basically powerful statistical regression algorithms, that are heuristic improvements over core algorithms invented in the 1960s, and there have been few theoretical breakthroughs since then (far fewer than in most other fields), so much so that many consider machine learning to be in the pre-science or pre-theory stage, being mostly about collecting data and trying out heuristics. It's silly to deny recent successes -- largely due to better hardware (although hardware progress is slowing down quickly) -- but we are behind, not ahead, of where we thought, even as recently as the 1990s, we'd be by now.

At this point we have no idea what role statistical regression plays in intelligence or whether we're even in the right direction. That statistics has become synonymous with intelligence (it used to be synonymous with lies) is certainly a cultural phenomenon that is not directly related to our actual knowledge of the field.

That computers perform some mental tasks (certainly more and more of them) better than humans has been a fact of computing since the 50s, and often a cause for wild claims. The invention of neural networks in the 40s and their implementation in digital computers in the 50s led some very respectable people (like Norbert Wiener) to declare that the problem of the brain will be solved in 5 years. The pragmatic Alan Turing thought that was ridiculous and predicted it would take 50. It's been almost 70 years and we haven't yet reached insect-level intelligence or anywhere near a complete understanding of the insect brain, so at this point, any claims that we are on the cusp of something, or starting to believe that our statistical regression algorithms reflect the beginning of intelligence is... misplaced.

On the other hand, it seems like we have not learned the lessons of misplaced confidence in AI, despite our relatively slow progress, and things are worse now as that we actually have some algorithms that are useful in certain restricted domains that we insist on calling AI, thus causing people to use them in domains where they are not only useless but downright harmful. In the meantime, some people draw attention to the dangers of real AI -- which may be anywhere between decades and centuries away (I believe we'll get there some day but we have no idea how or how soon) -- while distracting from the very real and already present dangers of "AI".