It’s just a Chinese room dude, it doesn’t actually do anything useful
What?
At best you’re arguing that because it’s not conscious it’s not useful, which… No.
My car isn’t conscious and it’s perfectly useful.
A system that can analyze patterns and either identify instances of the pattern or extrapolate on the pattern is extremely useful. It’s the “hard but boring” part of a lot of human endeavors.
We’re gonna see it wane as a key marketing point at some point, but it’s been in use for years and it’s gonna keep being in use for a while.
A system that can analyze patterns and either identify instances of the pattern or extrapolate on the pattern is extremely useful. It’s the “hard but boring” part of a lot of human endeavors.
I agree with most of what you’re saying here, but just wanted to add that another really hard part of a lot of human endeavors is actual prediction, which none of these things (despite their names) actually do.
These technologies are fine for figuring out that you often by avocados when you buy tortillas, but they were utter shit at predicting anything about, for instance, pandemic supply chains…and I think that’s at least partially because they expect (given the input data and the techniques that drive them) the future to be very similar to the past. Which holds ok, until it very much doesn’t anymore.
I’m sorry, they aren’t good at predicting?
My man, do you have any idea how modern meteorology works?
Well, I would disagree that they don’t predict things. That’s entirely what LLMs and such are.
Making predictions about global supply chains isn’t the “hard but boring” type of problem I was talking about.
Circling a defect, putting log messages under the right label, or things like that is what it’s suited for.
Nothing is good at predicting global supply chain issues. It’s unreasonable to expect AI to be good at it when I is also shit at it.
They make probabilistic predictions. Which are ok if you’re doing simple forecasting or bucketing based upon historical data, and correlates and all of that.
What they are crappier about is things that are somewhat intuitively obvious but can’t be forecasted on the basis of historical trends. So, like new and emerging trends or things like panic buying behavior making it so the whole world is somehow out of TP for a time.
I’d argue that relying solely on “predictive analytics” and just in time supply chains aggravated a lot of issues during the big COVID crunches, and also makes your supply chain more brittle in general.
You not having a job where you work at a level to see how useful AI is just means you don’t have a terribly important job.
What an brain drained asshole take to have. But I’ve seen your name before in my replies and it makes sense that you’d have it.
AI is useful for filling out quarterly goal statements at my job, and boy are those terribly important… 😆
Tranus@programming.dev 10 months ago
The Chinese room argument doesn’t have anything to do with usefulness. Its about whether or not a computer that passes the turing test is conscious. Besides, the argument is a ridiculous one to begin with. It assumes that if a subcomponent of a system (ie the human) lacks “understanding”, then the system itself (the human + the room + the program) lacks understanding.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Anything else aside, I wouldn’t be so critical of the thought experiment. It’s from 1980 and was intended as an argument against the thought that symbolic manipulation is all that’s required for a computer to have understanding of language.
It being a thought experiment that examines where understanding originates in a system that’s been given serious reply and discussion for 43 years makes me feel like it’s not ridiculous.
plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#LargPhil…