AI: There’s something happening here

The NYT has a forum on the Big Questions surrounding the current and future AI revolution/explosion/hype/whatever.

Some thoughts as a starting point for an LGM discussion of this whole topic:

I will confess to a high degree of skepticism and luddism in regard to the entire concept/phenomenon.

As to the skepticism, the large language models look at this point just like an elaborate party trick more than anything that deserves the label “intelligence.” (I realize there’s more to AI than LLMs, but it’s the one area in which I’ve had some actual interaction with the technology). It’s just very odd to me that, when it comes to AI, so many people seem to willfully ignore/forget that simulation is not replication. A CGI-generated scene of a volcano erupting in a movie is not a volcanic eruption, and would never become one no matter how much better the CGI technology gets. Why this point doesn’t apply with equal force to the simulation of cognition is genuinely beyond me.

In re the luddism, I agree with Erik that work is absolutely central to human identity, although I have an urge to make pedantic quibbles about distinctions between “work” and “labor,” which I’ll address in another post. Using technology to eliminate work in some profound structural way, as opposed to merely using it to create new kinds of work, was always eventually going to be a problem. It’s an iceberg that’s just been sitting out there for a couple of centuries now, waiting for the convergence of the twain, and maybe this is the decade or half century or what have you when the collision happens.

The problem here is twofold: If economies remain based on payment to labor for labor, then getting rid of 80% of the jobs (or whatever) is a gigantic problem, for reasons that our anarcho-tech overlords seem extremely eager to glide over as they indulge in their messianic fantasies about a purely algorithmic future.

But even if what Keynes called “the economic problem,” is solved, which is itself assuming a can opener of world historical dimensions, that doesn’t address the other problem, which is all the social/emotional work that work does to give human existence structure and meaning.

Before Bernard could answer, the lift came to a standstill.
“Roof!” called a creaking voice.
The liftman was a small simian creature, dressed in the black tunic of an
Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron.
“Roof!”

He flung open the gates. The warm glory of afternoon sunlight made him start
and blink his eyes. “Oh, roof!” he repeated in a voice of rapture. He was
as though suddenly and joyfully awakened from a dark annihilating stupor.
“Roof!”
He smiled up with a kind of doggily expectant adoration into the faces of his
passengers. Talking and laughing together, they stepped out into the light. The
liftman looked after them.
“Roof?” he said once more, questioningly.
Then a bell rang, and from the ceiling of the lift a loud speaker began, very
softly and yet very imperiously, to issue its commands.
“Go down,” it said, “go down. Floor Eighteen. Go down, go down. Floor
Eighteen. Go down, go .”
The liftman slammed the gates, touched a button and instantly dropped back
into the droning twilight of the well, the twilight of his own habitual stupor.

Brave New World (1932)