Inability to recognize intelligence is and will be devastating.
It's a pop-culture quote from a movie that was no masterpiece, I know, but "I, Robot" presented in two sentences an argument for having more sober expectations on what machine intelligence could be capable of, and of our own
> Detective Del Spooner: "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?"
> Sonny: "Can you?"
We're discrediting the capabilities of current machine learning models for being unable of producing the thoughts that many, many people are unable to either.
Alright, so the models are not at the level that us HN philosopher kings hold ourselves to be, and they won't be Senior Architects of distributed systems or what have you very soon, but what does it say about Average Joe, slightly-above-Average Joe, and their economic prospects? Specially since in the West and much of the developing world, we were taking solace in the idea that a service economy comprised of knowledge workers would provide plenty of opportunities on a political and economic landscape where manufacture was gone, or had never arrived.
-- Pseudo Sonny: "Can you?"
-- Pseudo Detective Del Spooner: "Ha-ha. So what the #!@! is a robot doing there, not doing what is required? I cannot, and I do not stand there clueless"
What is being engineered, toys for the satisfaction of some idle decadent sympathy urge? Have cats disappeared from the world?
> We're discrediting
We are shocked that an overly large number of individuals expect stones to bleed, and intelligence to pour out of machines that do not have intelligence coded inside, and that instead have unintelligence - acritical repetition - coded inside.
> what does it say about Average Joe
That he should catch up with his nature, if he shows the critical capacities of a simulacrum that has none.
> not at the level
No, no, no: it is not a matter of quantity but of quality: if you do not implement it or its origin, it will not be there.
> [Asimov]
Asimov is relevant. For example, I remember his idea that the State comes from Agriculture (~10000 BC), in the need to plan irrigation, or that the Abel vs Cain story could be a parallel of the political consequences of lands denied to pastors. Now: those seem to be good ideas, and their production can be an interesting goal. But there is something /before/ "creativity", or "advanced pattern recognition": it is /intelligence/, meaning that Asimov, after having spawned those hypoteses, has /vetted/ them as a required duly activity before confirming them in his set of founded hypotheses. You have to use intelligence, you have to have intelligence, and if you want to do AGI, you have to implement intelligence!!!
If we're setting the bar of personhood or dignity to being exceptional researchers and engineers, it doesn't bode well for the masses that aren't and won't be. Maybe this will result in a society of leisure where everyone can be that! I wouldn't bet on it, there's already more PhDs in the sciences and humanities than society can fit, and humans may just not work that way.
You're already dismissing concerns about the welfare of the merely average, for being unfit when competing with the Machine Learning models we may have in the near future.
Who created ours?
And if it's god (which god?), who created theirs?
