Select to expand quote
myscreenname said..
Like it or not it's coming.
"It" might be coming, but just what is "it"?
I agree that what it does is quite amazing, but at the same time, it's also quite stupid. Or does it even make sense to call it that? I've tried several times to see if I could save some time by getting it to produce some snippets of code for me, but never got anything useful out of it - gibberish really, although the syntax wasn't bad. Perhaps what I do isn't mainstream enough for it to have something useful to copy? But then when I've tried asking it some straight forward engineering questions, the response has started to look okay at first, but then you look closer and realise it has no idea what it's talking about....it's just blindly applying formulas - a bit like those kids at school that memorised how to solve a certain type of maths question without really knowing what they were doing. If the question got asked in an exam in the same format, they could answer it correctly, but when the question got twisted slightly, they'd make nonsense calculations and get it wrong.
If all it's doing is rearranging and regurgitating stuff it's been feed, what is the implication of that? I guess a lot (a majority?) of people do this in their daily jobs and therefore could be under threat, but what level of understanding or original thought is possible? If you have a whole world run this way, what would it be like? Dull and boring with no new discoveries being made? If you manage to produce a computer that could be deemed to have an equivalent number of neurons as a human brain, is that all that's needed to produce consciousness and develop new ideas? Or is there something intangible about the creativity a biological brain and its ability to be produce novel ideas that can never be reproduced by computer hardware? Would AI ever be able to think of creating a film like "Repo Man"?
It makes me think of some Netflix original series. They can be good, but they often seem to have a weird 'Netflixy' feel to them, like artificial flavouring....not quite right somehow. Or those Pixar films that are all the same no matter what the plot is... just a series of nauseating, regurgitated one-liners. Even worse are the Pixar sequels where, for some reason, repeating a line from the original movie is supposed to be funny... and that's what I wonder if an AI film will be like - just a mixed regurgitation of all previous films. As AI becomes more pervasive, I wonder if the world will start to feel like recycled plastic? It reminds me of that scene where Neo is being told about The Matrix by Morpheus, how you feel it in everything around you.