The approach to AI right now is based on belief. An influencer was saying that he doesn’t agree with the fact that LLMs can’t reason based on his rejection of human exceptionalism.
Then you have Claude developers referring to Claude in 3rd person mode for fear that people might mistake it to be sentient.
It’s only right now that we are living through an interactive embodiment of Turing’s conception of men as soulless machines.
The discourse about AI is divided between pragmatists and cultists. Pragmatists want tasks done better and cultists have an intense desire to validate their worldview.
Computers since their recent invention have always been centered around man. We would not have PCs as we have it, was it not for the brain. The Von Neumann architecture is not even a cheap copy of the brain. It’s literally a very high-level conceptual copy of the different functions of the brain as understood during his time.
The idea of neural networks as machines was postulated by McCullogh/Pitts, von Neumann was aware of it. Regular expressions were an offshoot of it. Later on weights were added to simulate the learning process. This goes back even further, to the formalization of languages, binding languages to the rule of logic, which gave birth to programming languages.
All this springs from the desire to find and deal with truths. Some find sport in dealing with and developing tools of truth, at the expense of truth. And truth demands actions.
I haven’t seen a foolish branch of computing as AI, unfortunately. Brilliant papers come out very often, with breakthroughs improving the current state of things. But, we rarely find based alternatives to the brain as foundational model.
That’s because developers consider the brain as the gold standard and an easy benchmark against which to compare models. The idea of neurons themselves are a pale imitation of the workings of the human brain, an organ we don’t even know where it stands on the scale of intelligence.
In the midst of all this, money matters the most. As long as money flows, people don’t care about the game they are playing. Papers enhance reputation, developers work on tasks, VCs squander on each hype rush producing a wonderful time warp machine, taking away the time to contemplate and reflect.
Don’t remain foolish during the nth rush.