We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.
But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.
This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.
So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).
Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.
For those of you who want a simplified ELI5 on how AI works:
Pretend I’m going to write a sentence. Statistically, most sentences start with the word “I”. What word typically follows “I”? Looking at Lemmy, I’ll pick “use” since that gives me the most options. Now what word typically follows the word “use” but also follows the phrase “I use”? With some math, I see “Arch” is statistically popular so I’ll add that to my sentence.
Scale this out for every combination of words and sentences and you suddenly have AI.
It’s just math. All the way down.
Well, in the gay corners of Lemmy, people have a habit of starting their sentences with “And”, but it’s also usually followed by “I” as with the general population. And you’d think the next word would make sense since it’s a statistical model after all, but we’re still wrestling with the medical mystery of why the last word is always “oop”.
I didn’t see it coming until I almost went through your first paragraph. Well played.