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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Erik Larson
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why AI computers will never think the way we do
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a review of Larson's book from https://www.harvard.com/book/9780674278660_the_myth_of_artificial_intelligence/
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson
“Exposes the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the dramatic claims being made for it.” —John Horgan
“If you want to know about AI, read this book…It shows how a supposedly futuristic reverence for Artificial Intelligence retards progress when it denigrates our most irreplaceable resource for any future progress: our own human intelligence.” —Peter Thiel
Ever since Alan Turing, AI enthusiasts have equated artificial intelligence with human intelligence. A computer scientist working at the forefront of natural language processing, Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to reveal why this is a profound mistake.
AI works on inductive reasoning, crunching data sets to predict outcomes. But humans don’t correlate data sets. We make conjectures, informed by context and experience. And we haven’t a clue how to program that kind of intuitive reasoning, which lies at the heart of common sense. Futurists insist AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted mind, but Larson shows how far we are from superintelligence—and what it would take to get there.
“Larson worries that we’re making two mistakes at once, defining human intelligence down while overestimating what AI is likely to achieve…Another concern is learned passivity: our tendency to assume that AI will solve problems and our failure, as a result, to cultivate human ingenuity.” —David A. Shaywitz, Wall Street Journal
“A convincing case that artificial general intelligence—machine-based intelligence that matches our own—is beyond the capacity of algorithmic machine learning because there is a mismatch between how humans and machines know what they know.” —Sue Halpern, New York Review of Books
from Stephen Meyer's article: https://stephencmeyer.org/2023/01/24/the-uniqueness-of-the-human-mind-stephen-meyer-and-janet-parshall/
Meyer also unpacks the types of reasoning we find in science, and how human life and the human mind are unique within the universe. Meyer mentions the work of computer scientist and philosopher Erik Larson, whose recent book The Myth of Artificial Intelligence examines what computers can and cannot do. “Computers lack the tacit knowledge and background knowledge to reason to conclusion about tasks for which they were not programmed to perform,” says Meyer. “In the process of learning what computers can and can’t do, we’re learning about the essential creativity of the human mind in the way we reason and the way we make discoveries.” The more we learn about computers and their abilities, the more we learn about ourselves and how unique we really are.
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