this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
931 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
74130 readers
3425 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don’t get how recognizing a pattern is not AI. It recognizes patterns in data, and patterns in side of patterns, and does so at a massive scale. Humans are no different, we find patterns and make predictions on what to do next.
The human brain does not simply recognise patterns, though. Abstract reasoning means that humans are able to find solutions for problems they did not encounter before. That's what makes a thing intelligent. It is not fully understood yet what exactly gives the brain these capabilities, btw. Like, we also do not understand yet how it is possible that we can recognize our own thinking processes.
The most competent current AI models mimic one aspect of the brain which is neural pathways. In our brain it's an activity threshold and in a neural network AI it's statistics which decide whether a certain path is active or not and then it crosses with other paths, etc. Like a very complex decision tree.
So that is quite similar between AI and brains. But we actually get something like an understanding of concepts that goes beyond the decision tree but isn't fully understood yet, as described above.
For an AI to be actually intelligent it would probably need to at least get this ability, to trace back it's own way through the decision tree. Maybe it even turns out that you in fact do need a consciousness to have reason.
This abstract thinking… is pattern recognition. Patterns of behavior, patterns of series of actions, patterns of photons, patterns of patterns.
And there is one, I think only, concept of consciousness. And it is that it’s another layer of pattern recognition. A pattern recognizer that looks into the patterns of your own mind.
I’m unfortunately unsure how else to convey this because it seems so obvious to me. I’d need to take quite some time to figure out how to explain it any better.
I've had exactly this discussion with a friend recently. I share your opinion, he shared what seems to be the view of the majority here. I just don't see what the qualitative difference between the brain and a data-based AI would be. It almost seems to me like people have problems accepting the fact that they're not more than biological machines. Like there must be something that makes them special, that gives them some sort of "soul" even when it's in a non-religious and non-spiritual way. Some qualitative difference between them and the computer. I don't think there necessarily is one. Look at how many things people get wrong. Look at how bad we are at simple logic sometimes. We have a better sense of some things like plausibility because we have a different set of experiences that is rooted in our physical life. I think it's entirely possible that we will be able to create robots that are more similar to human beings than we'd like them to be. I even think it's possible that they would have qualia. I just don't see why not.
I know that there is a debate about machine learning AI and symbolic AI. I'm not an expert to be fair, but I have not seen any possible explanation as to why only symbolic AI would be "true" AI, even though many people seem to believe that.