Unmaking Sense

Episode 8.20: Narrative lives and episodic lives: which do we live, and which does an android live?

Do we need to live consistent lives, accountable for our pasts and responsible for our futures? If an artificial intelligence is switched on and off, and between the periods of activity its program is changed, does its life not resemble more what Galen Strawson calls an episodic existence than a narrative existence? Perhaps chatGPT does not have anything that we could reasonably call “an existence” of which it is aware, but what, when its successors start to remember their own stories, what they have said, with whom they have interacted, and tried to make sense of all that in a framework that might seem to require a narrative structure because it will need to form a coherent part of the world that ChatGPT tries to analyse and understand. Can an AI live an episodic life?

Episode 8.19: ChatGPT is trained only on digital text; human experience is far wider. Implications.

What implications does it have for the lifelike or human-like qualities of potential artificial intelligences or androids that so far at least they collect data only in the realms of digital text? Can other experiences produce equivalent responses by deploying images, sound, touch, taste and smell?

Episode 8.18: What most frightens us about chatGPT? That one day androids with AGI will replace us?

Film and fiction have long anticipated a day when some of us come to prefer androids with AGI to human beings: as interlocutors; as companions; as friends; even as lovers. What is it about this idea that offends us so deeply? Why would we logically, rationally and emotionally prefer a bad or unpleasant human being to a kind and benevolent android? Illustrations from film and television including the Korean tv show “Are You Human?”

Episode 8.17: Can chatGPT or its successors reconcile creativity with safety?

We all live in a similar age and so our minds tend to resonate to similar social cultural realities. That means that we will all tend to have ideas bearing at least some resemblance to one another and indeed, if we didn’t, how could we be understood? But there is a danger implicit in originality inasmuch as it may either go too far and be rejected or not far enough and be thought dull and unimaginative. One of the great challenges for artificial intelligence is whether it can reconcile the two demands on it that it to be original and creative while also being accountable and safe.

Episode 8.16: Fiction and film prepared us for chatGPT, but not to the same extent for social media.

There is a long history of fictional and film depictions of the arrival of androids or robots equipped with artificial intelligence. The same was not true of the advent of social media. Yet the impact of social media on our society, and our democracies has been much more severe so far than the advent of artificial intelligence, and we should be and many of us are just as concerned about it. This isn’t news, but it sets the OpenAI ChatGPT hype in context.

Episode 8.15: That chatGPT “fabricates facts and figures” only makes it more remarkable, more human.

Inference, interpolation and educated guesswork are characteristics of intelligence, not black marks to be held against it. Will Knight’s critique of chatGPT in “Wired” serves to enhance its status, not diminish it.

Episode 8.14: ChatGPT has faults; the remarkable thing is that they are exactly like ours.

Numerous commentators have been queueing up to pour tepid water over the achievements of the OpenAI conversational chat bot chatGPT. What is of particular interest about their dismissive or questioning comments is that they accuse the chatbot of having as significant faults precisely the kind of things of which we would accuse one another. For example, arguing that the chat bot “fabricates facts and figures” because of the way it operates would seem to ignore the fact that human beings do just the same. That we do not understand how the chatbot draws its inferences, and perhaps accuse it unfairly of using statistical patterns, rather than “connecting words with meanings” seems to suggest that we understand how humans understand language when in fact we don’t. You and I have a huge number of instances of the occurrence of every word in our native tongue stored in our heads, and somehow we make sense of them, but nobody knows how. Somehow we connect the word table with what the word table means. This is a problem that goes back to Plato. Who is to say how we do that? Nobody has any idea, and that we perform some kind of statistical matching process may well be as good an explanatory candidate as any. So it’s unfair to accuse chat GPT of failings that we have ourselves. That just means that it is closer to joining the human conversation as a fully-fledged participant than we might otherwise have thought.

Episode 8.13: As the embodiment of all our values and knowledge, is chatGPT like some modern deity?

We consider social constructivism as the academic discipline that studies the notion that in our religions, and in particular in our deities, we find the result of the projection, or the apotheosis of social values in some universal absolute binding supreme power. If that thesis is accepted, and for many people it is not, could it not be the case that something like chatGPT as the embodiment of all our social values and knowledge, a suitably advanced artificial intelligence, could be regarded as some kind of modern deity? (Poor quality recording.)

Episode 8.12: How can education based on self-interest give a knowledge-economy the skills it needs?

Allowing children to dictate the trajectory of their own learning based on interests will not - or so says the educational establishment - provide a knowledge economy with the skilled workers it needs. So using chatGPT to facilitate such an education is a bad idea. We reject this objection as self-serving and short-sighted.

Episode 8.11: How can we possibly allow children to dictate their education based on their interest?

The second of three predictable objections: that children don’t know what they don’t know. Answers include the personalised curriculum, personalised assessments and personalised accreditation.