> do HN readers just think a human isn't such a complex entity
I'm someone who has made these kind of comments before. It may help you to place my such comments into the context that I am not someone who works in AI, but I am someone who studied philosophy and has both studied scientific literature on and thought deeply about the nature of the mind.
While we're not yet close to understanding the mind in entirety, something I was struck by as I read about the parts of the mind we do understand is just how many human capabilities do seem to be explainable on a physical neural network (as in an actual network of physical neurons, not the AI thing) basis without requiring any notion of conciousness or uniquely human (or even animal) capability.
My view is not that AIs are currently anywhere close to the capabilities of humans at the moment. But:
- I am somewhat agnostic on the question of whether they could match them in future. And I think other people should be too. We're not really in a position to know this yet.
- I think a lot of the limitation of AIs are limitations in IO capabilities: AIs can typically only consume text or images, and they can't typically influence the world themselves at all (one of the things that has come out of research into (human) perception is that it's generally very much an active process - activities that might naively seem passive like vision actually involve tight feedback loops and actively interacting with the world).
- To me the way modern "deep learning" models work does seem like computers genuinely learning from experience. That it's possible that it differs from human learning largely in scale and complexity rather than being fundementally different (it is of course possible that it's not the case, but I don't think this is obviously the case)
I would also agree with another commenter that part of the purpose of such comments is to provoke thought and break people out of their assumptions. Many people take the idea that human cognition is fundementally different to machine cognition (or even animal cognition!) for granted. And while that may ultimately end up being the case, I think it's valuable to question that belief.
I'm someone who has made these kind of comments before. It may help you to place my such comments into the context that I am not someone who works in AI, but I am someone who studied philosophy and has both studied scientific literature on and thought deeply about the nature of the mind.
While we're not yet close to understanding the mind in entirety, something I was struck by as I read about the parts of the mind we do understand is just how many human capabilities do seem to be explainable on a physical neural network (as in an actual network of physical neurons, not the AI thing) basis without requiring any notion of conciousness or uniquely human (or even animal) capability.
My view is not that AIs are currently anywhere close to the capabilities of humans at the moment. But:
- I am somewhat agnostic on the question of whether they could match them in future. And I think other people should be too. We're not really in a position to know this yet.
- I think a lot of the limitation of AIs are limitations in IO capabilities: AIs can typically only consume text or images, and they can't typically influence the world themselves at all (one of the things that has come out of research into (human) perception is that it's generally very much an active process - activities that might naively seem passive like vision actually involve tight feedback loops and actively interacting with the world).
- To me the way modern "deep learning" models work does seem like computers genuinely learning from experience. That it's possible that it differs from human learning largely in scale and complexity rather than being fundementally different (it is of course possible that it's not the case, but I don't think this is obviously the case)
I would also agree with another commenter that part of the purpose of such comments is to provoke thought and break people out of their assumptions. Many people take the idea that human cognition is fundementally different to machine cognition (or even animal cognition!) for granted. And while that may ultimately end up being the case, I think it's valuable to question that belief.