Love to see all these books, and yes, the tetris thing is amazing :)
Ah, the AI question. I am extremely nervous writing basically anything about it because I think it would annoy just about everyone, but my personal take on it is -- the Discourse around AI is suffering from people talking past each other on a massive scale and it is obscuring some real issues, which I am glad to see you bring up. I will try my best to use online spaces to address and lift up voices addressing these very real issues and defer Philosophical Arguments About What Is Intelligence to late night drinks that (hopefully) do not get recorded by machines and incorporated back into themselves in an endless loop of self-reinforcing Content. :D
I hear /all/ that. I think the existence and functionality of LLMs adds whole new colors and perspectives on longstanding and far-ranging discussions about philosophy of mind, Chinese rooms, how language works, what is thought and to what extent are people even doing it most of the time, etc etc etc... And I want to be having those conversations, though far away from the internet! (You free next weekend?) But the "AI" label right now seems like a marketing gimmick or conversational trick, much the way "metaverse" was used way way back in '22. "This is the Cyberpunk VR future, we promise, pay no attention to what's *actually* going on." When we follow Sam Altman etc in using AI to refer to LLMs, we're distracted from what LLMs actually are, what they do, what they *might* do, why the prospect of their existence excites capital, where all that "large language" came from in the first place, how we feel about *that*, etc. To me, it's *such* a flagrant naked distraction that it makes me want to take back all the grandfathered generous nerd use of "AI" to describe, e.g., algorightmic-trading bots, Counterstrike bots, chess bots, and—in this article—Tetris bots.
Yes! Let's talk about LLMs and philosophy next weekend, I am down for sure :)
Your comment, by the way, reminds me so much of what I've encountered in business. Business folks call SO many things "AI" because it sells, and I think that's very relevant to your comment. And that was probably fine when you wanted to call machine learning AI, I mean not fine, but at least you were mostly talking about systems that improved weather prediction accuracy by ten percent or detected spam emails. But then they had to beat humans and chess, and go, and now they're *writing* emails. And suddenly we have deep philosophical questions, we humans do, where meaning is very important, and throwaway calling everything "AI" is a bad idea...
Love to see all these books, and yes, the tetris thing is amazing :)
Ah, the AI question. I am extremely nervous writing basically anything about it because I think it would annoy just about everyone, but my personal take on it is -- the Discourse around AI is suffering from people talking past each other on a massive scale and it is obscuring some real issues, which I am glad to see you bring up. I will try my best to use online spaces to address and lift up voices addressing these very real issues and defer Philosophical Arguments About What Is Intelligence to late night drinks that (hopefully) do not get recorded by machines and incorporated back into themselves in an endless loop of self-reinforcing Content. :D
I hear /all/ that. I think the existence and functionality of LLMs adds whole new colors and perspectives on longstanding and far-ranging discussions about philosophy of mind, Chinese rooms, how language works, what is thought and to what extent are people even doing it most of the time, etc etc etc... And I want to be having those conversations, though far away from the internet! (You free next weekend?) But the "AI" label right now seems like a marketing gimmick or conversational trick, much the way "metaverse" was used way way back in '22. "This is the Cyberpunk VR future, we promise, pay no attention to what's *actually* going on." When we follow Sam Altman etc in using AI to refer to LLMs, we're distracted from what LLMs actually are, what they do, what they *might* do, why the prospect of their existence excites capital, where all that "large language" came from in the first place, how we feel about *that*, etc. To me, it's *such* a flagrant naked distraction that it makes me want to take back all the grandfathered generous nerd use of "AI" to describe, e.g., algorightmic-trading bots, Counterstrike bots, chess bots, and—in this article—Tetris bots.
Yes! Let's talk about LLMs and philosophy next weekend, I am down for sure :)
Your comment, by the way, reminds me so much of what I've encountered in business. Business folks call SO many things "AI" because it sells, and I think that's very relevant to your comment. And that was probably fine when you wanted to call machine learning AI, I mean not fine, but at least you were mostly talking about systems that improved weather prediction accuracy by ten percent or detected spam emails. But then they had to beat humans and chess, and go, and now they're *writing* emails. And suddenly we have deep philosophical questions, we humans do, where meaning is very important, and throwaway calling everything "AI" is a bad idea...