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Douglas Hofstadter is one of my childhood heroes. I have devoured all of his books and always felt that his curiosity about artificial intelligence was similar

by mg 3y ago

Douglas Hofstadter is one of my childhood heroes. I have devoured all of his books and always felt that his curiosity about artificial intelligence was similar to mine. Now we made this huge jump in AI capabilities, and I am really surprised that he mostly seems to have negative feelings about it. To me, it is quite the opposite. With these new LLMs, a childhood dream has come true. And I am mesmerized by the progress and possibilities.

david927 3y ago
I wouldn't see it that way. When the telephone came out, there was a burst of, "Well, that's it for people visiting each other in person!" I didn't read this as him saying, "We won't learn new languages," but rather, "We won't be forced to, and learning a new language is a wonderful thing. In our gain, let's not lose sight of what we're losing."
- popularonion 3y ago
  > When the telephone came out, there was a burst of, "Well, that's it for people visiting each other in person!" Well, they were completely right, just a century or so off on the timeline…
- JieJie 3y ago
  Star Trek imagines that even in an age where computers have universal translators, people will still learn languages for "personal development" purposes, or to honor their ancestry, or simply to not have to rely on a computer for a regular activity. Ideally, the translation ability of AI should make it easier for us to practice conversations in new languages, and actually encourage more language learning through total immersion without having to travel to a country where that language is the primary. Whether Star Trek is aspirational or inspirational, I guess we'll have to see.
giraffe_lady 3y ago
Hofstadter was an early and lasting influence on me too. The most consistent thing in his writing is a sense of intellectual joy, playfulness, and curiosity. When tools or toys are venues for people to create those experiences he's excited about them, and that was the position of "AI" for most of his career. He now perceives AI to be a tool that will limit, deny, or replace these feelings & experiences, and so has shifted his relationship to its potential. I'm slightly surprised that he sees AI this way, but not at all surprised this is how he feels about it given that he does. I think it's too early to say if he's right but his feelings are certainly consistent with his views and long history of playful curiosity.
colechristensen 3y ago
He wasn’t an AI practitioner, he wrote about it and I’m somewhat glad he hasn’t said a lot about the current machine learning advancements. Many people accomplished in their own scientific field have tried their hand at commentary or criticism about AI and come off as completely clueless and uninformed. A Nobel prize in physics does not qualify one to wade ankle deep into machine learning and start pontificating about this and that.
jamager 3y ago
Yeah... I think there is a very fine and blurred line between using AI to augment / enhance something, and to completely replace it. And generative AI, kind of leans more in the later... at least, in the way it is being used now: Machine Translation is great and can mean the world for minority languages, but now everyone language learning app has to have a chatbot, which, I think, it does replace human conversation when learners say that now they don't need tutors etc.
jxy 3y ago
Yeah, I don't understand how Douglas Hofstadter came from [0] > There may be programs which can beat anyone at chess, but they will not be exclusively chess players. They will be programs of general intelligence, and they will be just as temperamental as people. "Do you want to play chess?" "No, I'm bored with chess. Let's talk about poetry." That may be the kind of dialogue you could have with a program that could beat everyone. That is because real intelligence inevitably depends on a total overview capacity-that is, a programmed ability to 'jump out of the system", so to speak-at least roughly to the extent that we have that ability. Once that is present, you can't contain the program; it's gone beyond that certain critical point, and you just have to face the facts of what you've wrought. to [1] > Although my prediction about chess-playing programs put forth there turned out to be embarrassingly wrong (as the world saw with Deep Blue versus Kasparov in 1997), those few pages nonetheless express a set of philosophical beliefs to which I am still committed in the strongest sense. and now to > Why would anyone want to devote thousands of hours to learning a foreign language if, by contrast, they could simply talk into their cellphone and it would instantly spit out “the same message” in any language of their choice, in their own voice, and with a perfect accent to boot? not to mention his other articles recently. It's as if he forgot that there are still human beings learning, playing, and competing in chess or go, dedicating thousands of hours of their lifetime to it. [0] both copied from GEB

by mg 3y ago

david927 3y ago

I wouldn't see it that way. When the telephone came out, there was a burst of, "Well, that's it for people visiting each other in person!" I didn't read this as him saying, "We won't learn new languages," but rather, "We won't be forced to, and learning a new language is a wonderful thing. In our gain, let's not lose sight of what we're losing."

popularonion 3y ago
> When the telephone came out, there was a burst of, "Well, that's it for people visiting each other in person!" Well, they were completely right, just a century or so off on the timeline…
JieJie 3y ago
Star Trek imagines that even in an age where computers have universal translators, people will still learn languages for "personal development" purposes, or to honor their ancestry, or simply to not have to rely on a computer for a regular activity. Ideally, the translation ability of AI should make it easier for us to practice conversations in new languages, and actually encourage more language learning through total immersion without having to travel to a country where that language is the primary. Whether Star Trek is aspirational or inspirational, I guess we'll have to see.

giraffe_lady 3y ago

Hofstadter was an early and lasting influence on me too. The most consistent thing in his writing is a sense of intellectual joy, playfulness, and curiosity. When tools or toys are venues for people to create those experiences he's excited about them, and that was the position of "AI" for most of his career. He now perceives AI to be a tool that will limit, deny, or replace these feelings & experiences, and so has shifted his relationship to its potential. I'm slightly surprised that he sees AI this way, but not at all surprised this is how he feels about it given that he does. I think it's too early to say if he's right but his feelings are certainly consistent with his views and long history of playful curiosity.

colechristensen 3y ago

He wasn’t an AI practitioner, he wrote about it and I’m somewhat glad he hasn’t said a lot about the current machine learning advancements. Many people accomplished in their own scientific field have tried their hand at commentary or criticism about AI and come off as completely clueless and uninformed. A Nobel prize in physics does not qualify one to wade ankle deep into machine learning and start pontificating about this and that.

jamager 3y ago

Yeah... I think there is a very fine and blurred line between using AI to augment / enhance something, and to completely replace it. And generative AI, kind of leans more in the later... at least, in the way it is being used now: Machine Translation is great and can mean the world for minority languages, but now everyone language learning app has to have a chatbot, which, I think, it does replace human conversation when learners say that now they don't need tutors etc.

jxy 3y ago

Yeah, I don't understand how Douglas Hofstadter came from [0] > There may be programs which can beat anyone at chess, but they will not be exclusively chess players. They will be programs of general intelligence, and they will be just as temperamental as people. "Do you want to play chess?" "No, I'm bored with chess. Let's talk about poetry." That may be the kind of dialogue you could have with a program that could beat everyone. That is because real intelligence inevitably depends on a total overview capacity-that is, a programmed ability to 'jump out of the system", so to speak-at least roughly to the extent that we have that ability. Once that is present, you can't contain the program; it's gone beyond that certain critical point, and you just have to face the facts of what you've wrought. to [1] > Although my prediction about chess-playing programs put forth there turned out to be embarrassingly wrong (as the world saw with Deep Blue versus Kasparov in 1997), those few pages nonetheless express a set of philosophical beliefs to which I am still committed in the strongest sense. and now to > Why would anyone want to devote thousands of hours to learning a foreign language if, by contrast, they could simply talk into their cellphone and it would instantly spit out “the same message” in any language of their choice, in their own voice, and with a perfect accent to boot? not to mention his other articles recently. It's as if he forgot that there are still human beings learning, playing, and competing in chess or go, dedicating thousands of hours of their lifetime to it. [0] both copied from GEB