Chatbots process enormous amounts of data and produce convincing outputs but, he says, they do not grasp the meaning of the concepts they manipulate.
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As radio host Mark Davis put it recently, “ultimately everything AI does is go in search of something that some human being said or wrote sometime.”
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On this episode, host Pat Flynn is joined by Dr. Selmer Bringsjord, author of a fascinating and provocative chapter in the recent volume Minding the Brain. Dr. Bringsjord argues for the immateriality of mathematical objects as well as the immateriality of the human person. The argument challenges physicalism and raises questions about the nature of consciousness and the human person. The Read More ›
Computer scientist and AI expert Selmer Bringsjord provides a wide-ranging discussion of artificial intelligence (AI) and its capabilities. Bringsjord, a professor at Rensselaer, addresses three features humans possess that AI machines won’t be able to duplicate in his view: consciousness, cognition, and genuine creativity. Additional Resources
The GPT-3 chatbot is awesome AI. Under the hood, GPT3 is a transformer model that uses sequence-to-sequence deep learning that can produce original text given an input sequence. In other words, GPT-3 is trained by using how words are positionally related. The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language is called syntax. Semantics is the branch of linguistics concerned with the meanings of words. GPT-3 trains on the syntax of training data to learn and generate interesting responses to queries. This was the intent of the programmers. GPT-3 is not directly concerned with semantics. Given a tutorial on a topic from the web, for example, GPT-3 does not learn from the tutorial’s teaching, but only Read More ›
What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will by Mind Matters podcast host Robert J. Marks is now available in audiobook form. Listen now to an excerpt from the second chapter as read by Larry Nobles. Will machines someday replace attorneys, physicians, computer programmers, and world leaders? What about composers, painters, and novelists? Will tomorrow’s supercomputers duplicate and exceed humans? Read More ›
In Episode 10 of Science Uprising (September 21, 2022 10:35 min), we get a look at why — despite ultra-fashionable TED Talk-style doomsday claims — computers are not taking over. The short film starts with Sophia the Robot, that some hope will play a big role in health care for seniors: “Hello, world.” (0:13) “What emotion do you feel being awake in life?” “Curious.” Great. (Yikes…!) The film then cuts to the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute’s Nick Bostrom who announces to an enthralled gathering, “Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make. Machines will then be better at inventing than we are now, as superintelligence with such technological maturity would be extremely powerful and Read More ›
Dr. Marks points out that Nobelist Roger Penrose, a great scientist, differs with late colleague Stephen Hawking. He thinks human thought is non-computable.
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Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will (Discovery Institute Press, 2022) by Robert J. Marks is available here. What follows is an excerpt from Chapter 2. Selmer Bringsjord, and his colleagues have proposed the Lovelace test as a substitute for the flawed Turing test. The test is named after Ada Lovelace. Bringsjord defined software creativity as passing the Lovelace test if the program does something that cannot be explained by the programmer or an expert in computer code.2 Computer programs can generate unexpected and surprising results.3 Results from computer programs are often unanticipated. But the question is, does the computer create a result that the programmer, looking back, cannot explain? When it comes to assessing creativity (and Read More ›
(Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will (Discovery Institute Press, 2022) by Robert J. Marks is available here.) Some have claimed AI is creative. But “creativity” is a fuzzy term. To talk fruitfully about creativity, the term must be defined so that everyone is talking about the same thing and no one is bending the meaning to fit their purpose. In this and subsequent chapters we will explore what creativity is, and in the end it will become clear that, properly defined, AI is no more creative than a pencil. Creativity: Originating Something New Lady Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), daughter of the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, was the first computer programmer, writing algorithms for a machine that Read More ›
In Define information before you talk about it, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor interviewed engineering prof Robert J. Marks on the way information, not matter, shapes our world (October 28, 2021). In the first portion, Egnor and Marks discussed questions like: Why do two identical snowflakes seem more meaningful than one snowflake? Now they turn to the relationship between information and creativity. Is creativity a function of more information? Or is there more to it? This portion begins at 10:46 min. A partial transcript and notes, Show Notes, and Additional Resources follow. Michael Egnor: How does biological information differ from information in nonliving things? Robert J. Marks: I don’t know if it does… I do believe after recent study that the mind Read More ›
The article “How an Artificial Superintelligence Might Actually Destroy Humanity” is one of the most irresponsible pieces about AI I have read in the last five years. The author, transhumanist George Dvorsky, builds his argument on a foundation of easily popped balloons. AI is and will remain a tool. Computers can crunch numbers faster than you or me. Alexa saves a lot of time looking up results on the web or playing a selected tune from Spotify. A car – even a bicycle – can go a lot faster than I can run. AI is a tool like fire or electricity used to enhance human performance and improve lifestyles. Like fire and electricity, AI can be used for evil or Read More ›
Neuroscientist Joel Frohlich (pictured) asks us to reflect on the “philosophical zombie.” That’s not the zombie of the late nite frites. It’s an entity that behaves outwardly in every respect like you and me but has no inner experience (think Stepford Wives). Philosopher David Chalmers originated the term in 1996, by way of illustrating why consciousness is a Hard Problem. A powerful computer can crunch through many difficult jobs without any inner life or consciousness. But, Frohlich, who is editor in chief of the science communications website Knowing Neurons, asks, what if we weren’t sure? How would we test that? Trying to determine if a powerful AI is conscious means getting past programming that might enable it to generate plausible Read More ›
In last week’s podcast, “The Chaitin Interview IV: Knowability and Unknowability,” Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks interviewed mathematician Gregory Chaitin, best known for Chaitin’s Unknowable Number, on a number of things, including whether computers can show creativity. Chaitin has thought a lot about that: https://episodes.castos.com/mindmatters/Mind-Matters-127-Gregory-Chaitin.mp3 This portion begins at 21:34 min. A partial transcript, Show Notes, and Additional Resources follow. Robert J. Marks: We’re talking, just in general, about the unknowable. Roger Penrose recently won a Nobel Prize for his work with Stephen Hawking on black hole theory. He also wrote a book called The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics (1989) and he followed it up with The Shadows of the Mind: Read More ›
At first, “What is information?” seems like a question with a simple answer. Stuff we need to know. Then, if we think about it, it dissolves into paradoxes. A storage medium—a backup drive, maybe—that contains vital information weighs exactly the same as one that contains nothing, gibberish, or dangerously outdated information. There is no way we can know without engaging intelligently with the content. That content is measured in bits and bytes, not kilograms and joules—which means that it is hard to relate to other quantities in our universe. In this week’s podcast, “Robert J. Marks on information and AI, Part 1.” neurosurgeon Michael Egnor interviews Walter Bradley Center director and computer engineering prof Robert J. Marks on how we Read More ›
In a recent podcast, Rensselaer professor Selmer Bringsjord discusses AI and creativity with computer engineering professor and Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks. The difference between writing novels and playing games like Go and chess is that writing novels does not mean winning according to a set of rules. A machine can be programmed with rules and do the calculations faster—much, much faster—than a human. A good novel requires creativity in the face of situations that are only partly definable. If a novel succeeds, many people agree that the writer has captured essential elements of human nature and life circumstances. That’s what makes the great novels so memorable. Sports reporting is somewhere in the middle in that a great Read More ›
Turing thought that computers could be got to think. Thus he had to address Lovelace’s objection from a century earlier, that they could not be creative.
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In an unsanitized, politically incorrect (but factual) history, Selmer Bringsjord talks about how the tormented genius Kurt Gödel took up a quest that dated back a thousand years to prove the existence of God by formal logic. His original version didn’t quite work but his editor’s version passed an important logic test.
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Kurt Gödel toppled a tall tower of mathematical reasoning with publication of his work showing no formal system of math could be both complete and consistent. He also gave a mathematical proof of the existence of God. Is Gödel’s proof valid? Robert J. Marks and Dr. Selmer Bringsjord discuss mathematics, Kurt Gödel, and the ontological argument. Show Notes 01:05 | Read More ›
The underlying problem with creating immortality by uploading our minds to computers is that people are conscious and even the most sophisticated foreseeable computers are not. And we are not at all sure what consciousness even IS.
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