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.
Right. I’ll see if I write a longer article some day and post it in this community. All the antropomorphization is kind of an issue in my opinion. And we humans are programmed to see faces, intent and such things. I mean that’s why illusions work. Or religion. Or mentalists… But it’s also not the opposite. The grouping words together on usage … that’s markov-chain chatbots from the 1980s. But that’s also not what happens here. Modern LLMs are a different beast. They’re specifically designed to do more than that. And they do. We have some understanding. But it’s a long story and very technical. And I believe we have to give a good definition of words like “understanding” or “reasoning” first. Seems lots of people deduct what they mean by looking at humans. And even with humans it’s more complicated than just saying they “reason”. In my experience a lot of being human includes not being reasonable. And we even need tools like maths and logic if we want to reason properly and find something that is true. And by seeing how illusions etc are effective on us, we can even see how smoke and shadows are a part of how we operate.