DeepSeek threw the marketplace into a tizzy last week with its low-cost LLM that works better than ChatGPT and its other competitors. But the company’s ultimate goal is the same as that of Open AI and the rest: build a machine that thinks like a human being. The achievement is labelled AGI, for “Artificial General Intelligence.”
Even though AI will require profound, meaningful changes and trade-offs of personal agency, sense of self, how we relate to others, and what we perceive and believe, there’s no discussion about what it means and whether or not we want it.
AIs don’t “think” about tasks any more than blenders “think” about making milkshakes.
CES aims to present a view of the world that rises to the level of self-fulfilling prophecy. Rest assured that the media coverage of it this week will glowing reflect that certainty and its subtle impacts will be felt in the how AI is talked about until, well, next year’s event.
What the tech types call “inefficiency,” I call “experience.” The label obscures the fact that our exchange the freedom to make decisions, right or wrong, will be a trade that is irreversible long before we know its cost.
AI recursive self-improvement is the kind of thing that government regulators should regulate, only they don’t, probably because they buy the propaganda coming from said folks about the necessity of unimpeded innovation (or the promises of its wondrous benefits).
An AI in the recording studio isn’t an equal collaborating partner but rather an advanced filing system.
If the mysterious intersection of thought and language is the algorithm for AI, is it reasonable to expect that it will somehow emerge from processing an unknown critical threshold of images?
Maybe our current approach to seeing AI as like the tulip or South Sea crazes, or an imperfect technical tool like an Edsel or laser disc, is indeed our era’s latest bubble, or bubbles.