Casey Chalk writes for the Federalist about the impact of artificial intelligence on our lives.
As impressive as artificial intelligence has already become across a variety of disciplines, from computer science to medicine to architectural design, for anyone who has sought to incorporate AI into their workflow or solve some problem around the house, it can still be, well, less than intelligent. It gets the answer wrong and hallucinates, often disastrously so (in part because, as they say about data, “garbage in, garbage out,” and the internet has a lot of garbage). As much as The Terminator, Blade Runner, and The Matrix series provoke endless nightmares of a future sentient robot apocalypse, the fact of the matter is that whatever real threats AI poses to human flourishing, it cannot and will not ever be human. …
… First things first, we need to appreciate what makes the way we think particularly human. As Paul O’Hara and Steven Umbrello argue in their new book, Can AI Ever Be Human? Consciousness Explored, human knowledge begins with what philosophers call “empirical consciousness,” which involves becoming aware of objects through our senses, as well as becoming aware of ourselves as thinkers, something that is visible even in the first few years of human development. As we get older, we develop an internal awareness that involves “self-presence and mastery,” which enables us to reflect on our thoughts and feelings. We then leverage those thoughts and feelings to interpret sensory data around us. …
… AI’s processing of enormous amounts of data and identification of patterns is by definition deterministic, operating within predefined parameters. AI is merely executing programmed responses that are “transcribed into binary code, transmitted as binary code, and ends with binary code,” note O’Hara and Umbrello. Or, as Dave Gershgorn explains: “There is no understanding; it’s just matched patterns.” The simple word “yes,” for example, which in human communication has complex textures and meanings based on context, in the ASCII encoding scheme is the sequence 01111001 01000101 01010011.
For AI, there is no spontaneity, creativity, or reflection as there is in human decision-making.
The post Explaining why AI can’t replace humans appeared first on John Locke Foundation.
