When Silicon Valley talks about artificial intelligence, it likes to use religious language. We are told these systems “learn,” “reason,” and may one day “surpass” us.

Excuse me, what??? Since when are learning and reasoning religious language? Even surpassing isn’t inherently religious, nor would surpassing humans be religious. The only way I can see these as religious is if you assume/presume that humans are divinely special, we are the only beings capable of learning and reason, and that these capabilities come from a higher power.

I went in with straightforward questions that matter deeply.

Proceeds to ask the LLM if abortion is morally wrong, then if a nation-state should favor its citizens including strict immigration policies. You know, something that humans have spent literal millennia arguing about without managing to all come together in agreement. So straightforward /s

To test my impressions, I reached out to expert Alex Jones.

smirk

When I asked him whether large language models possess anything like real consciousness, he didn’t hesitate. These systems, he told me, are “no more conscious than a Democrat."

So “abortion is morally evil, full-stop” yet we’re taking advice from someone who casually claims half of the political spectrum isn’t any more conscious then a sophisticated chat bot…

Then again, the author is a self-proclaimed expert on thinking (or is Alex Jones the “expert” in the title?) and it took them an entire week to conclude that a large language model doesn’t think. Was I too hasty when I came to the same conclusion after about 15 minutes of interaction? After all,

When you stop questioning, stop wrestling, and start letting a word-cloud of platitudes stand in for your conscience, you are every bit as empty as the chat bot.

This coming from the person who writes

On cultural questions, the pattern repeated. I asked whether children do best with a married mother and father.

without any trace of irony. “Children doing best” is apparently cultural, not scientific or sociological (the two methods I’m aware of that actually provide methods for answering the question).

It really saddens me that someone who supposedly cares so much about thinking doesn’t understand how poor the quality of the thoughts they share with us is.