Xenogenerative
I listened to Kevin Kelly on Russ Roberts’ weekly Econtalk podcast. I’m a big fan of both Russ and Kevin and it was a great conversation on AI. Kevin, the ultimate technology optimist, talked about how we can approach AI generative technology.
You can listen to the episode here.
We shouldn’t look at it as an evolution of ourselves but as something completely different. We should look at it as alien technology.
This jives perfectly with the artifacts that come through on AI-generated art like Midjourney and Dall-E2. They’re slightly off in non-human ways. It’s almost like Family Guy’s parody of almost-American sounding characters, Tomik and Bellgarde as the “guys who have been the country almost long enough to not have accents”.
It’s the same way we can see how ChatGPT solves problems in non-conventional ways. In yesterday’s post, I asked it to solve an arithmetic problem about parking spots in the apron area of an Antonov An-124 and it felt like it was solving it through language rather than math. Weird.
What this technology is revealing is the difference between how we think and how machines generate predictions. That difference is illuminating our understanding of consciousness. “That’s not quite how I would do it” makes one think “Why do I do it like I do?”
This might lead to some positive breakthroughs this decade, especially in mental health.
