Transhumanists and AI
Post #1017
While watching Tucker Carlson interview Elon Musk (~Minute 1:35:00), Tucker mentions how a parent’s love for a child will animate all of the things that they have to say about the child, and how computers (AI) can’t do that. This makes Elon react in his chair and look away in his usual thoughtful, but seemingly distraught, mannerism.
Elon carefully tip-toes around Tucker’s statement that computers (AI) cannot love, without openly disagreeing with it, but by diverting the topic to one of regarding others (philanthropy), something that Elon appears to believe that computers can do. The indication is that Elon believes that computers can be taught to regard others.
Right there we could then stop to ask Elon a pivotal question:
How come none do?
This short question might make Elon mad or frustrated, or perhaps he would say that we’re still getting around to it — but that we’ve been working on it and, in the near future, computers will be able to care for others like mothers care for children. The idea behind this belief is materialism, wherein everything can be programmed.
A funny meme about AI is this one:
What it shows is that the computers, invariably, are as stupid as the people who program them. It’s the GIGO principle: garbage in/garbage out.
But philosophically, you can borrow from quotes to get a 40,000-foot view of what intelligence is in order to determine if it is something which could ever get successfully programmed into a hard drive:
Intelligence follows curiosity. James Clear
Intelligence is caring for the right things. Maxime Lagacé
The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination. Albert Einstein
It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Knowledge is having the right answers. Intelligence is asking the right questions. Wisdom is knowing when to ask the right questions. Unknown
They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns). Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The first quote suggests that you require a special desire and motivation (“curiosity”) in order to be able to attain intelligence, and it is not clear how some computer circuitry is supposed to become instilled with such desire.
The second quote says you have to have a sort of propulsive morality — i.e., a care that drives you into action — in order to have intelligence, knowing good from bad, and right from wrong. It is unclear how you can put “caring” inside of silicon chips.
The third quote, from Einstein, says imagination (unprompted, unhampered mental activity) is required. But that ought to be difficult or impossible to “program.”
The fourth quote, from Dostoyevsky, is cryptic, and merely states it is false to say that “Intelligence is as intelligence does.”
The fifth quote fits intelligence in-between knowledge and wisdom, and shows intelligence to be something more than mere knowing.
The sixth quote shows how a lot of what intelligence is is deliberate non-attention to some of the details in the world. In the movie, Defending your Life, the protagonist has a lawyer who supposedly uses more than 50% of his brain (super-smart). When asked to speak up in defense of his client, the lawyer stays quiet.
When confronted about not actively defending his client, the lawyer explains how it was that saying something at that time would have made things even worse. The best defense at that time was silence. Would an AI program be able to know when it is best to keep your mouth shut? It does not seem likely that you could “teach it” to shut up.