Re:No Ghost in the Machine
by MaxBarraclough on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @04:38PM
(#22488438)
Strongly agree. Banks expresses those points well.
The piece fails to account for that we already know that it's possible for physical entities to think, and to make independent decision. We know this because human beings exist.
No good reason is offered to justify the idea that the difference in intelligence between humans and computers is a difference of category, rather than merely a difference of (ever shrinking) degree.
From the article:
> The intellectual incoherence of believing that computers can think or make independent decisions is self-evident
Nonsense. This is a very strong claim about the universe, or rather, one of two equally silly claims:
* That general intelligence relies upon the process of evolution by natural selection, and that it can never even in principle arise from a process of deliberate design
* That general intelligence relies upon a particular substrate, specifically neurons, and that it cannot be achieved with other substrates, such as transistors
Such a claim cannot be justified with a hand-wavey appeal to intuition, or with arguments about moral accountability, which are all the author has to offer.
Also, this next quote strikes me as misleading. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than me can confirm/disconfirm my take:
> chess prowess depends on players’ ability to recognize general situations that are in some sense “like” ones they’ve seen before, either over the board or in books. Again, the computer largely sidestepped what is most significant for humans, and hence for the game, by analyzing every position from scratch, and relying on speed to make up for its weakness at gestalt pattern recognition.
That may be true of chess, but what about Go? As I understand it, the reason computers can now play Go effectively (i.e. Alpha Go), is that a breakthrough was made in discarding unpromising subtrees of the game's possible progression, allowing effective moves to be selected relatively efficiently. That's not brute-force. That's precisely the kind of clever trick we'd expect from a skilled human player.
The whole piece strikes me as poorly considered. The thoughts of Dan Dennett are far more worthwhile. If you've read this far, you may enjoy a quick read of the Wikipedia article on Dennett's intentional stance. [0]
Dennett also makes the relevant observation that mankind is constantly creating machines with general intelligence and moral accountability: other human beings. This ties back to the article's points about moral accountability.
The piece fails to account for that we already know that it's possible for physical entities to think, and to make independent decision. We know this because human beings exist.
No good reason is offered to justify the idea that the difference in intelligence between humans and computers is a difference of category, rather than merely a difference of (ever shrinking) degree.
From the article:
> The intellectual incoherence of believing that computers can think or make independent decisions is self-evident
Nonsense. This is a very strong claim about the universe, or rather, one of two equally silly claims:
* That general intelligence relies upon the process of evolution by natural selection, and that it can never even in principle arise from a process of deliberate design
* That general intelligence relies upon a particular substrate, specifically neurons, and that it cannot be achieved with other substrates, such as transistors
Such a claim cannot be justified with a hand-wavey appeal to intuition, or with arguments about moral accountability, which are all the author has to offer.
Also, this next quote strikes me as misleading. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than me can confirm/disconfirm my take:
> chess prowess depends on players’ ability to recognize general situations that are in some sense “like” ones they’ve seen before, either over the board or in books. Again, the computer largely sidestepped what is most significant for humans, and hence for the game, by analyzing every position from scratch, and relying on speed to make up for its weakness at gestalt pattern recognition.
That may be true of chess, but what about Go? As I understand it, the reason computers can now play Go effectively (i.e. Alpha Go), is that a breakthrough was made in discarding unpromising subtrees of the game's possible progression, allowing effective moves to be selected relatively efficiently. That's not brute-force. That's precisely the kind of clever trick we'd expect from a skilled human player.
The whole piece strikes me as poorly considered. The thoughts of Dan Dennett are far more worthwhile. If you've read this far, you may enjoy a quick read of the Wikipedia article on Dennett's intentional stance. [0]
Dennett also makes the relevant observation that mankind is constantly creating machines with general intelligence and moral accountability: other human beings. This ties back to the article's points about moral accountability.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance