Have to say that I love how this idea congealed into “popular fact” as soon as peoples paychecks started relying on massive investor buy in to LLMs.
I have a hard time believing that anyone truly convinced that humans operate as stochastic parrots or statistical analysis engines has any significant experience interacting with others human beings.
Less dismissively, are there any studies that actually support this concept?
But claims of what future performance will be as given by people with careers, companies, and life changing amounts of money on the line are also no guarantee either.
The world would be a very different place if technology had advanced as predicted not even ten years ago.
Not a guarantee, no. A very, very strong predictor though. You have to have some kind of evidence beyond just vibes to start making claims that this time is totally different from all the others before anyone should take you seriously.
Ehhh… It depends on what you mean by human cognition. Usually when tech people are talking about cognition, they’re just talking about a specific cognitive process in neurology.
Tech enthusiasts tend to present human cognition in a reductive manor that for the most part only focuses on the central nervous system. When in reality human cognition includes anyway we interact with the physical world or metaphysical concepts.
There’s something called the mind body problem that’s been mostly a philosophical concept for a long time, but is currently influencing work in medicine and in tech to a lesser degree.
Basically, it questions if it’s appropriate to delineate the mind from the body when it comes to consciousness. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that that mental phenomenon are a subset of physical phenomenon. Meaning that cognition is reliant on actual physical interactions with our surroundings to develop.
The meme would work just the same with the “machine learning” label replaced with “human cognition.”
Have to say that I love how this idea congealed into “popular fact” as soon as peoples paychecks started relying on massive investor buy in to LLMs.
I have a hard time believing that anyone truly convinced that humans operate as stochastic parrots or statistical analysis engines has any significant experience interacting with others human beings.
Less dismissively, are there any studies that actually support this concept?
I’d love to hear about any studies explaining the mechanism of human cognition.
Right now it’s looking pretty neural-net-like to me. That’s kind of where we got the idea for neural nets from in the first place.
At every step of modern computing people have thought that the human brain looks like the latest new thing. This is no different.
Past results are no guarantee of future performance.
But claims of what future performance will be as given by people with careers, companies, and life changing amounts of money on the line are also no guarantee either.
The world would be a very different place if technology had advanced as predicted not even ten years ago.
Not a guarantee, no. A very, very strong predictor though. You have to have some kind of evidence beyond just vibes to start making claims that this time is totally different from all the others before anyone should take you seriously.
Ehhh… It depends on what you mean by human cognition. Usually when tech people are talking about cognition, they’re just talking about a specific cognitive process in neurology.
Tech enthusiasts tend to present human cognition in a reductive manor that for the most part only focuses on the central nervous system. When in reality human cognition includes anyway we interact with the physical world or metaphysical concepts.
There’s something called the mind body problem that’s been mostly a philosophical concept for a long time, but is currently influencing work in medicine and in tech to a lesser degree.
Basically, it questions if it’s appropriate to delineate the mind from the body when it comes to consciousness. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that that mental phenomenon are a subset of physical phenomenon. Meaning that cognition is reliant on actual physical interactions with our surroundings to develop.
If by “human cognition” you mean "tens of millions of improvised people manually checking and labeling images and text so that the AI can pretend to exist," then yes.
If you mean “it’s a living, thinking being,” then no.
Not at all