A friend writes to me and tells me about the amazing things he has been getting AI to do, in particular in building a model to calculate probabilities of certain events in baseball games.
Here is my response:
I don’t know what to think about Chat GBT–or AI more generally. I haven’t used it and don’t know how to use it. But I have been reading (in a desultory way) about it in an effort to understand it. Most of the stuff I read (predictable, I guess, given the bubble in which I find things) is pretty skeptical. More interested in pointing out its deficiencies, while also taking pot shots at the enthusiasts and what does seem their wildly overstated claims about AI and the future it will bring. But your experience is much more concrete. Here’s a task and here is how this tool does things that would be impossible to do without it. That’s meat on the bones. Exciting—and to my mind pretty scary.
I used to ask my students this question: why do so many people find the idea that our thoughts, emotions, and fantasies (i.e. our consciousness) are the product of biochemical processes? What is the threat of acknowledging that material fact? And I can’t say I ever got a cogent answer to that question, even though lots of students did fess up to resisting the idea that it’s all biochemical. They didn’t want their consciousness reduced to chemistry. But couldn’t really articulate why that was so distasteful and/or threatening.
There seems to be a similar resistance in the stuff I read to accepting that AI is more intelligent than humans and that it not only will be able to do everything humans can do, but will also be able to do things humans cannot do. It’s not the second part that seems the problem. Most everyone accepts that AI can do things humans cannot. But there is the ongoing effort to identify things AI can’t do—so as to leave at least a few things to humans alone. And then the temptation becomes to posit those few things AI can’t do as the very things that are essentially human, the very things that are most valuable in life.
So, maybe, in both cases of resistance (to chemical reductive accounts of consciousness and to visions of an AI that can do it all) the stake is human-ness. Just as in desperate attempts to distinguish humans from all the other animals. Hard to dislodge the self-love that underwrites humanism. Even harder when that self-love is an anxiety driven form of denial. Humans just aren’t as different from animals or AI as so many humans wish them to be.
In the case of AI (in my limited understanding), it’s not chemical reduction but numerical reduction. AI can encompass anything that can be calculated through translation into numbers. So I hear/read constantly that what AI cannot do is supple judgment/evaluation. To take the case of baseball: AI (in this view) could not look at eight players and assess which ones have the “tools” to succeed at the highest level. (Leave aside the fact that humans have proved fallible, to say the least, in making such judgments.) The issue here would be whether the “eye test” can be reduced to numbers (i.e. to measurements of the players’ bat speed etc.). Or, alternatively, if the numbers when put against the eye test consistently produce better predictions. In the case of baseball, it seems pretty clear at this point that the numbers are more reliable judges of potential. The larger issue is whether there are other areas of human practice where the numbers prove not as reliable predictors as considered human judgment.
So it has become a common theme now to say that AI threatens the production of skilled evaluators. Having AI do the basic tasks of any enterprise (lawyering, accounting, writing of any sort) deskills those who work in those fields because they miss the apprenticeship, the immersion in cases, the iterations of practice that produce considered judgment. And that gets coupled with claim that AI itself is not good at judgment because it simply averages what is already on record. It cannot recognize or value the innovative (ironic given what a god-term “innovation” is for the techies).
Henry Farrell, to my mind, has been the most interesting person to read on such questions. Here’s a link to one of his blog posts that considers this issue of reduction to numbers. Farrell is of the party that insists there are issue of import to we humans that are ill served if we allow them to be reduced to numbers, what he calls “numerical rationalism.”
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