The idea that large language models aka “AI” can “think” or “create” in any meaningful way was based in a robotic mis-apprehension of the nature of human consciousness, which was powerfully elucidated 40 years ago by thinkers like John Searle. Large language models are machines, and human beings are flesh and blood. Its only 25 year old autists who don’t understand the difference or see how and why it matters.
No, AI doesn’t “think” — and it’s not going to destroy the universe, let alone write a decent rock and roll song or a novel. At the same time, it’s a powerful advance over previous knowledge based tools with amazing applications throughout the sciences and with the capacity to help us rewire everything from the professions to our educational system. The data centers that power these new tools are the equivalent of electrical power plants a century ago.
The impulse to ban these new technologies or bring them under centralized government control is like opposing electricity or demanding that the government hold a monopoly on steel production or radio. It’s at best a dead end, and at a worst a recipe for tyranny.
History, both ancient and recent, has taught us that there is no group of selfless experts in white coats who act in the public interest. COVID was only the latest reminder. As our founders wisely taught us, society is made up of competing interests which should check each other’s claims on power.
No one cares about Dario, his wife, or Sam Altman’s IPO. Its all noise. If they wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on a mechanistic idea of consciousness, they should have read John Searle back in college. That’s not my problem, or your problem, or society’s problem. Its their investors’ problem.
What we should be thinking and talking about now is how to use these powerful new tools to make ourselves and our society freer, healthier and more open to human creativity and protential. Bust up the knowledge monopolies. Make higher education free and available to everyone. Make access to the best legal and medical knowledge equally available to rich and poor alike.
Big social transformations are already afoot. Its time to man up and be Americans, get out of the big cities and their conformist group-think bubbles, and make a new Eden.