j4orz annual ai armchair
nullius in verba
Welcome to the annual ai armchair: a corner of the internet where once a year near Christmas time, respite is taken from the daily drugery of chopping wood and carrying water to speculate about humanity's collective future: this is where I take a break from shape rotating to engage in wordcelling by the fireplace.
The deep statistical learning approach to artificial intelligence has reignited the realization that evolution has dropped us off at perplexing point in time where we can now observe and potentially partake in the process of creation. By zooming out from the menageries of jira, standups, and slack, one becomes aware that the seminal discussions which took place in the early 20th century with the advent of the logicist's computer are eerily simialr to those we're having today in the 21st century with the advent of the connectiont's large language model.
Both today and approximately 100 years ago, we've managed to orchestrate electrons in a dance which implement algorithms that were once deemed the hallmark of human intelligence. Ifs the artificial intelligence research program succeeds, then future textbooks will demarcate ChatGPT as the moment that transitioned humanity from the information revolution to the intelligence revolution. With moments like these, all the big questions that were asked since the dawn of humanity come screeching back into our lives like distant relatives during the holidays. Questions that grapple with the fundamental nature of reality such as:
- what is the world?
- what can we know?
- who are we?
- what should we do?
The goal of the annual armchair explorations is to provide small principled packets of epistemic entropyš explosions which showcase the questions that arise in my mind while working with artificial intellgence on a daily basis. Each year I cover how the overall direction of the field relates to the bigger philosophical project of naturalizing the mind.
With that said, my exploration will be limited insofar as to ask whether we're asking the right questions to begin with. Philosophy (including internet armchairing) is a suitable tool for distinguishing precise terms from fuzzy notions, identifying fallacious arguments, and ensuring we're asking the right questions. However once we have those questions, science is needed to come up with answers by operationalizing explanations through experimentation.
Given that make my living as a compiler engineer by day, I am limiting my civic responsibility to exploring these questions once a year, with the goal to MATH (Make America Think Harder). If as a result, more people are using my thoughts as stepping stones to individually explore nuanced topics in SEP (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) following the spirit of the Enlightenment's nullius in verba ideal — rather than dropping their next hot take on the internet — then by my standards, I have succeeded.
Moving forwards, a more, thorough, understanding of artificial intelligence is important for everyone the same way basic computer literacy is expected today.
Archive