When Disney’s animatronic Abraham Lincoln was about to deliver the Gettysburg Speech at the Illinois Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, my Aunt Gladys, who had skipped work to attend the tour, immediately passed out. Because it was weird. Because it was the inanimate that had come to life. Because it was Frankenstein and the Golem again. This is exactly how many pontificators reacted to the recent release of ChatGPT. It sprang up and they passed out.
They fear that the Gizmo (and others, including Microsoft’s new chatbot Bing) will put every writer and artist in America out of work, that all articles, essays, and images will eventually emerge from a black box created by the unfathomable workings of the neural network. of the deep mind. (It’s even listening to us now!)
And that’s just the minor concern. The big concern is that chatbots’ ability to speak will somehow bring about their own consciousness, at which point – the so-called singularity – these devices, both immortal and determined to keep improving themselves, jump way ahead, the leaving humanity in the evolutionary quagmire.
The fact that so many people I admire have been gripped by such panic doesn’t surprise me. Not really. Humans are built to see life in anything that resembles a face. We see figures in the clouds. We hear voices in the wind. (Huckleberry Finn: “The wind was trying to whisper something to me and I couldn’t make out what it was, so it sent shivers down my spine.”) Maybe it’s because we can recognize God when he finally turns around. When we finally crack the ultimate code, maybe we can see the ultimate programmer.
I think we make the most lasting difference in life in the things we created ourselves. We build it to walk, and then when we see it walk, we believe it’s alive. And fainted.
ChatGPT just spits back what someone else spat in. It is our own work that has been assembled and crushed and sent back to us. But the genius of human intelligence always lies in the leaps, the insights gained through dead reckoning and stupid intuition. The words composed by ChatGPT are just reverberations, echoes of an earlier moment and a past example of human creation. The device does not even know the meaning of the language it is trading. He doesn’t even know what it’s like to sip a big, cold Budweiser on a Tuesday at Wrigley Field or jump 15 garbage cans on a Triumph motorcycle.
Instead, it accesses passages written by people who have been through these things, passages that are nothing but data for the machine to change into a new pattern and a different kind of nothing.
(According to the mystics, something that is alive but has no soul is evil.)
The mere idea that such a machine is alive is a misconception of human intelligence, which, like so many misconceptions, stems from the poor logic of metaphor. Men are toxic. It’s a metaphor. And what do you do with a toxic substance? destroy it Time is a river. It’s a metaphor. And how do you stop a current? hell
If the mind is a computer – another metaphor; The mind is not a computer – the computer is a mind. That means it’s sentient – or soon will be – and immortal, meaning we’re done.
This is the most important lesson from the past: you never know what will happen. The creators of the Illinois Pavilion had terrible problems with their animatronic Lincoln. Sometimes the robot will get up and say the Gettysburg address as programmed. Sometimes he malfunctioned and just sat staring at the spectators. And sometimes, even though he couldn’t understand the meaning or symbolism of his actions, he would get angry and smash his chair.
Rich Cohen is the most recent author of The Adventures of Herbie Cohen: World’s Greatest Negotiator.
Source: LA Times
Roger Stone is an author and opinion journalist who writes for 24 News Globe. He is known for his controversial and thought-provoking views on a variety of topics, and has a talent for engaging readers with his writing.
