Some scholars of AI warn that the present technologies may never add up to “true” intelligence or “human” intelligence. But much of the world may not care about that.
Human assistance
- AI has been rapidly finding industrial applications, such as the use of large language models to automate enterprise IT.
- Experts express concern that the dominant work of deep learning today, if it simply pursues its present course, will not achieve what he refers to as “true” intelligence, which includes things such as an ability for a computer system to plan a course of action using common sense.
The Bottomline
A rhetorical regime is forming that is concerned with persuasion, not with intelligence.
That may be the direction of things for the foreseeable future. If AI increasingly gets stuff done, in biology, in physics, in business, in logistics, in marketing, and in warfare, and as society becomes comfortable with it, there may be fewer and fewer people who even care to ask, But is it intelligent?
The Turing Test
The British mathematician Alan Turing anticipated that “general educated opinion” would come to accept that machines have intelligence.
He himself anticipated this change in attitude. He predicted that ways of talking about computers and intelligence would shift in favor of accepting computer behavior as intelligent.
Replicating the Mind
The stakes could not be higher in training artificial general intelligence systems. AI is the first tool that convincingly replicates the unique capabilities of the human mind. It has the ability to create a unique, targeted user experience for every single citizen. This can potentially be the ultimate propaganda tool, a weapon of deception and persuasion the likes of which has not existed in history.
