Comment by TeMPOraL
6 months ago
> It is like someone inventing the aeroplane and someone looks at it and says "oh, it's flying, I guess it's a bird". It's not a bird!
We tried to mimic birds at first; it turns out birds were way too high-tech, and too optimized. We figured out how to fly when we ditched the biological distraction and focused on flight itself. But fast forward until today, we're reaching the level of technology that allows us to build machines that fly the same way birds do - and of such machines, it's fair to say, "it's a mechanical bird!".
Similarly, we cracked computing from grounds up. Babbage's difference engine was like da Vinci's drawings; ENIAC could be seen as Wright brothers' first flight.
With planes, we kept iterating - developing propellers, then jet engines, ramjets; we learned to move tons of cargo around the world, and travel at high multiples of the speed of sound. All that makes our flying machines way beyond anything nature ever produced, when compared along those narrow dimensions.
The same was true with computing: our machines and algorithms very quickly started to exceed what even smartest humans are capable of. Counting. Pathfinding. Remembering. Simulating and predicting. Reproducing data. And so on.
But much like birds were too high-tech for us to reproduce until now, so were general-purpose thinking machines. Now that we figured out a way to make a basic one, it's absolutely fair to say, "I guess it's like a digital mind".
A machine that emulates a bird is indeed a mechanical bird. We can say what emulating a bird is because we know, at least for the purpose of flying, what a bird is and how it works. We (me, you, everyone else) have no idea how thinking works. We do not know what consciousness is and how it operates. We may never know. It is deranged gibberish to look at an LLM and say "well, it does some things I can do some of the time, so I suppose it's a digital mind!". You have to understand the thing before you can say you're emulating it.