Where's My Towel?

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I was just reading an interview [ under the byline "Lunch With The FT", this weekend] with the computational linguist Emily Bender, who has been taking metaphorical chunks out of the AI gold rush's claims that it represents some sort of New Jerusalem [fans of the late, great Joe Don Baker will get that reference] in evolution, taking mankind out of itself and to the stars as immortals. Ahem. She wrote a paper in 2021 in which she described AI chatbots and image-creation tools as "stochastic parrots" [her neologism], the definition of which is, and I quote: '... a system for "haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in it's vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning"...' Apparently this led to much umbrage in the AI community, motivating OpenAI's Sam Altman to tweet '... "i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u"...' The key point here is one of the nature of consciousness itself and wherein it lies. Are we mere parrots, or do we have minds? Intuitively, we all know the answer, but would struggle to frame it in words.

The answer to this age old philosophical question is still elusively just beyond reach of the human mind, which makes some sense as that understanding would itself necessitate our conscious mind standing outside of itself as a dispassionate and disinterested observer, which would logically be impossible, unless one invokes religion in some form or another: faith or belief - both of which are constructs of that very conscious mind itself - similarly logically inconsistent. Again, the inability of a lens to focus on itself. I agree with Bender on the point that there is an inherent 'dumbness' to AI, and that any semblance it exhibits to actual consciousness is extrapolation and 'in-reading' from our own. Wishful thinking on the part of the Gold Rush pioneers desperate to cash in on AI's commercial promise, and conversely wistful thinking on behalf of the rest of us who don't take consciousness so very lightly. As my son so wisely said yesterday [and I paraphrase for brevity], you aren't before you're born, and likewise after you're dead. It's the bit in between that we don't yet understand, despite our best - conscious - efforts...

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