You’re the one who made this philosophical.
I don’t need to know the details of engine timing, displacement, and mechanical linkages to look at a Honda civic and say “that’s a car, people use them to get from one place to another. They can be expensive to maintain and fuel, but in my country are basically required due to poor urban planning and no public transportation”
ChatGPT doesn’t know any of that about the car. All it “knows” is that when humans talked about cars, they brought up things like wheels, motors or engines, and transporting people. So when it generates its reply, those words are picked because they strongly associate with the word car in its training data.
All ChatGPT is, is really fancy predictive text. You feed it an input and it generates an output that will sound like something a human would write based on the prompt. It has no awareness of the topics it’s talking about. It has no capacity to think or ponder the questions you ask it. It’s a fancy lightbulb, instead of light, it outputs words. You flick the switch, words come out, you walk away, and it just sits there waiting for the next person to flick the switch.
I’m happy it happened and gave us up to book 6 on the little screen.
The show runners for both the syfy and Amazon seasons were the original writers, so everything is very true to their vision of the story. I’m only sad that they didn’t get to finish the final few books on television. The whole series is a Masterpiece of hard science fiction.
You have to know that some dinosaur at ibm is screaming about how they gave up the centralized computer and is salivating over gigabit fiber so he can charge everyone 15 bucks a month to use an ibm mainframe.
Stadia almost didn’t suck, I bet we’re 10 years from phones just being hand terminals that tap into a local server and desktops won’t be far behind.
I didn’t bring up Chinese rooms because it doesn’t matter.
We know how chatGPT works on the inside. It’s not a Chinese room. Attributing intent or understanding is anthropomorphizing a machine.
You can make a basic robot that turns on its wheels when a light sensor detects a certain amount of light. The robot will look like it flees when you shine a light at it. But it does not have any capacity to know what light is or why it should flee light. It will have behavior nearly identical to a cockroach, but have no reason for acting like a cockroach.
A cockroach can adapt its behavior based on its environment, the hypothetical robot can not.
ChatGPT is much like this robot, it has no capacity to adapt in real time or learn.