George Gilder is optimistic about AI’s potential contributions to economic flourishing, but he’s nonetheless staunch on the point that it can never be creative. Echoing the sentiments of Robert J. Marks, who argued this in his book Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will, Gilder thinks that while AI can be a helpful tool in a number of sectors, it can’t think. Hence the title of his 2020 book: Gaming AI: Why AI Can’t Think but Can Transform Jobs. In the Silicon Valley piece by Vish Gain, Gilder’s views are aptly quoted:

The threat of AI to me is that people worship it and defer to it. They think that their perception is not relevant anymore in a world where AI supposedly has all the answers. But all those answers are programmed from the past. They’re pattern recognition from digital feeds of data that happen to dominate the internet. And that’s not wisdom – that’s the ability to see patterns in the past and project them into the future. ChatGPT, for instance, might have some plausible surfaces of knowledge, but it’s not fundamentally creative. It’s a consensus engine.

-Vish Gain, ‘AI will increase productivity with more entrepreneurs and fewer workers’ (siliconrepublic.com)

Contrary to the belief that eventually AI will achieve “artificial general intelligence,” exceeding the human mind, Gilder thinks the creativity of human beings remains, and will always remain, unique and non-computable.