Artificial Intelligence and Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky has had a stroke, been out of commission since April last year, and is currently recuperating in Brazil. Not the best situation, the poor man is 95 and paralyzed on one side of his body.
However, he published an interesting opinion piece on Artificial Intelligence in the New York Times before the stroke: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html
Suffice to say, Chomsky doesn’t believe AI is actual thought. Certainly, not original thought anyway. I’ve also discussed Jared Lanier’s views of AI, before: https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/how-to-picture-ai.
He, too, sees its limitations.
The notable thing is while one group of investors see the ‘unlimited’ possibilities of AI: https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/23/2-ai-stocks-on-track-to-be-trillion-dollar-compani/. Expectations published 2 weeks AFTER Chomsky’s piece. Things are currently quite different.
Sabine Hossenfelder made a great ‘Reality Check’ video on AI:
With recognition the reality is, it’s just quite not there.
Information on Nividia published today: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/insiders-selling-nvidia-stock-100700017.html. Insiders are selling the stock; totally my biased view, the deep pocketed people are taking money cause the priority of cash supersedes the ability of the product.
Think Boeing and planes falling out of the sky, what the company is meant to do is tossed aside in the drive for greater Share Holder Value. Why Stocks are valued for their potential rather than their actual company productivity.
Nividia has not lived up to its potential.
In Chomsky’s piece, the many strands of types of intelligence used to learn language are considered plus the MORALITY of language learning. To quote: The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.
Further to paraphrase Humboldt: It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make "infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.
Computers can only come to conclusions based on the Data collected, the key is to come to infinite conclusions, regardless of the totality of Data supplied.
Get it? It’s not the infinite opportunities available to explore, truly original thinking is seeing infinite opportunity DESPITE the limited options. Cause that is thinking, and we’ve all had to do it?
Necessity is the Mother of Invention, not the other way around despite what Capitalists think.
Like so much else, I do believe REAL AI is a scam. Any Lawyer can cite precedence, a GOOD Lawyer can argue Law.