Comment by JohnFen
3 years ago
I don't understand. "Synthetic intelligence" is just a synonym for "artificial intelligence". The term has all the same issues, does it not?
3 years ago
I don't understand. "Synthetic intelligence" is just a synonym for "artificial intelligence". The term has all the same issues, does it not?
Actually I agree with them a new name would be helpful. I would propose inorganic intelligence to try to pick a term with less value judgments.
AI is really an overloaded term that includes 70 years of snake oil, Skynet, the Singularity and killer robots. I think we need a new name to start fresh.
And personally, I think we are extremely biased by our sci-fi to think of this tech as malevolent. As far as we can see, it can only know what we teach it since it relies on all of our perceptions to learn. LLMs seem both extremely promising as a useful tool and very pliant to the operator’s wishes. I’m way beyond “this is a fancy next word predictor” as I think it’s emergent behavior has many of the hallmarks of reasoning and novel inference, but at best I think it is only part of a mind and an unconscious one at that.
> Let’s forget the term AI. Let’s call them Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (SALAMI).
https://blog.quintarelli.it/2019/11/lets-forget-the-term-ai-...
> it can only know what we teach it since it relies on all of our perceptions to learn
> I think it’s emergent behavior has many of the hallmarks of reasoning and novel inference
You contradicted yourself here, right?
> The term has all the same issues, does it not?
It could be useful for a similar reason as the euphemism treadmill. We could leave behind all of the misguided assumptions about AI with the old 'artificial intelligence' nomenclature and move forward with 'synthetic intelligence' which has our new understanding of what systems like GPT-4 can do.
I'm thinking the problematic part of the term isn't the "artificial" part, but the "intelligence" part.
Since nobody actually knows what "intelligence" is, the word will mean to people whatever they want it to mean.
I’m partial to Plausible Regurgitation
>Since nobody actually knows what "intelligence" is
Everybody knows what intelligence is. Even if we can't agree on a precise definition, it's pretty obvious that it's the thing that humans and other animals do that involves learning, reasoning, planning, and problem solving. We can also agree that being successful at certain tasks constitutes intelligence. Solving a math problem is intelligence. Writing a poem is intelligence.
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I think Artificial Intelligence has taken on the meaning that the intelligence is real but just that it's coming from machines. Synthetic intelligence (at least to me) sounds more like we're acknowledging that the machines aren't really intelligent and just simulating intelligence.
Why not just eliminate the middle man and call it simulated intelligence? That at least implies that there are different levels of fidelity as quantified by number of parameters and training data set size.
This makes more sense
If we can’t (and we haven’t) define intelligence, how could we possibly define artificial intelligence or synthetic.