Will we see artificial intelligence surpass ours?
It will surpass us, because the progress of machine intelligence is already uniformly accelerated. Every week they announce a major progress: just yesterday they presented a new GPT Chat that surprises the world…
I tried it and it makes a lot of mistakes.
Obviously. Artificial intelligence is imperfect; the human, too. But do you remember Alan Turing, inventor of the computer and the Enigma, who deciphered the secret codes of the Wehrmacht?
I saw the movie about his life – he was a genius.
And it is: he said that there would be a computer – the universal machine – that would solve all problems. He did not say that there would be a machine for every problem, but that a single machine, changing in each case the way it works, the program, the software, would solve them all.
Well, he nailed it.
And this was a philosophical idea, not a mathematical one; which later became practical application. And that’s what I do: look for those ideas. Today we carry in our pockets this universal Turing machine we call a mobile phone and it takes you back home as quickly as it reads you the news.
This certainly gives us more power, but I don’t know if more happiness.
Turing guessed that we would have cell phones; but he fell far short of predicting its power: he believed that computers were useful for deciphering codes, for example, but that they would never be able to solve problems reserved only for humans, such as winning at chess.
Well, it seems he was wrong about that.
This is the point! Humans have always fallen short in classifying problems as solvable or not by machine artificial intelligence. Then it was said that the machine would never be able, as we do, to distinguish one human face from another…
Today the mobile recognizes us all.
Because the human knew how to reduce the recognition to calculating the distance between the pupils, something that only the machine knows how to do and better than him: not only does he recognize us but he does it better and faster than us.
And now the ChatGPT would interview him better than me?
Maybe with better grammar even.
I do my best in English, teacher.
Writing an essay in good English is something that not even a year ago we all thought was reserved for refined minds, and now anyone’s mobile phone does it.
I will order the GPT a tercet in the spring, let’s see if it rhymes well…
…
“Spring brings us the illusion / of a new beginning, of a new reason / to grow, love, live with devotion (…)”.
You wouldn’t be able to improve it in the 20 seconds it took. The machine will do faster and better what we thought only we could do.
And will it surpass us?
In what?
in intelligence
And what is intelligence? I think that in view of what we see that AI is capable of doing, we have to change our concept of intelligence.
Will there be anything machines can’t do?
No. And I pondered the answer.
Why are you so sure they will overtake us and so quickly?
I am because I have studied, reasoned, contrasted…
Like a machine?
…And until now I thought that the machine would surpass us, but on a scale of centuries. And now I think you and I and most readers will see it. And what’s disruptive is not only that, but she’s much faster at thinking than we are.
What does artificial intelligence teach us about our own?
That the same results can be achieved, as machines do, with methods, in principle, less refined – with millions of data – than with our reasoning.
And where does this take us?
To the multiverses. Humans have been adapting to the changing demands of the environment with a brain that has been evolving; but the fact that in this evolution we have adopted a certain way of understanding reality does not mean that it is the only one…
Are you already thinking in another way?
Feynman said that the continuity of space – that there is always a jump between one point and another – would one day be questioned. And maybe one day we’ll discover that there are other ways to think about reality… I’m already trying.
