Re: Chinese Room I mentioned the Chinese Room thought experiment to my erstwhile boss, a bona fide philosopher. His reaction, "Anything follows from a false premise.". I think he meant that having a room full of Chinese scholars who laboriously execute a complex algorithm they don't understand is preposterous. Maybe something like that reasoning caused you to react disdainfully when you did.
--- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 2:22 PM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <[email protected]> wrote: > Just for any old cf: > https://analyticsindiamag.com/open-ai-gpt-3-code-generator-app-building/ > > Someone mentioned in a recent thread, here, the Chinese Room thought > experiment, to which my reaction is always "Bah! That's nothing but a > loaded question" ... like "have you stopped beating your child?" But the > truth is, my answer to the Chinese Room is that it *is* intelligent. GPT-3 > is nothing but the Chinese Room. Similarly, all we are is deep memory > machines trained up on huge datasets. At some point, I've made the argument > that the demonstration of *understanding* can't be made through language. > As fond as I am of repeating back someone's expression in one's own words > to demonstrate you grokked their point, *ultimately* the only demonstration > of understanding that I really accept is in the *doing* or the *making* of > stuff. > > Now, there's some prestidigitation behind debuild.co. But at first blush, > here is a machine that *understands* the website specification well enough > to actually code the website. The AI skeptics will move the goalposts, of > course, as they always do. E.g. they can say that programming a website to > meet specs isn't a big deal, we've had declarative and domain-specific > languages for awhile. And web pages and programming languages are all > purely linguistic anyway. But it's a short trip from here to, say, a CNC > machine, a 3D printer, a script for a light show, or even algorithmic > composition of music. > > I'm reminded of people who are expert at some task, like playing baseball > or whatever, but when asked *how* they do what they do, they're at a loss > ... tacit but no reflective understanding ... like a cat not really > recognizing itself in a mirror, where dolphins do. > > What's actually missing in the machines we berate as being mindless > algorithms is not general intelligence or universal computation. It's > general-purpose sensorimotor sytems ... universal manipulation ... hands > with thumbs, tightly coupled feedback loops like our sense of touch, > excruciatingly sensitive data fusion organelles like olfactory bulbs, etc. > I think I can argue that's what gives us "understanding" ... not whatever > internal computation we're capable of. > > > -- > ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ > > - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/FRIAM-COMIC> > http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ >
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