Article
Analysis No, AI Isn't Sentient, You Absolute Morons
Maggie Harrison
- But here’s the thing: Artificial intelligence isn’t yet (and likely won’t ever be) conscious. This is despite the fact that a lot of people — especially those building the ‘intelligent’ machines — just want it to be. To that end: Why?
- Humans, in their endless search to make meaning, constantly anthropomorphize non-human things, all the time. “I knew from long experience that the strong emotional ties many programmers have to their computers are often formed after only short experiences with machines,” Weizenbaum wrote of the experience. “What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”
- The animals we usually hold in higher regard than others are usually those that we consider more ‘intelligent’ than others, because they display some kind of behavior humans can identify with. They use tools (apes), they have funerals (elephants), they live in complex social groups (dolphins). And as humanity tends to measure intelligence strictly within the context of humanity, these creatures suddenly become a bit less animal, and a bit more human. In the case of artificial intelligence, a similar bias is literally built into the packaging (an important difference being that AI is still, you know, inanimate, and animals actually do think and feel, which is actually sentience).
- Note: now, this is a great analogy between humans’ perspective on animals vs. Ai
- Whenever we give significant meaning to anything, we offer it significant power.Of course, our proclivity to give these machines distinctly human features, be that names like Eliza (or, again: Alexa or Siri), or human-ish voices, or physical attributes can reaffirm that effect as well.
- It might be further argued that a version of the Eliza effect extends to technologies beyond AI. Social media algorithms, for example — especially when it comes to advertisements — are often treated as mystery or magic, even extolled as godly or all-knowing. We talk about “the algo” like it knows something we don’t, or everything we do.
- these algorithms didn’t just happen. They were made by people. And given human information — about people, by people. In social media’s case, that information is usually a bought-and-sold digital footprint. And the people doing the building and buying and selling also have names, which sometimes rhyme with Shmark Shmuckerberg.