Really starting to think that the right take-away from the present moment in AI is the understanding that “intelligence” is not actually anything special. Rather, it’s something that can be just imbued into a tool as needed.

Reluctant anti-utopian | Breaker of things

The implication of this, and what I think all of the discourse around AI is trying very hard to stay away from (probably out of extreme unconscious discomfort), is that “human” intelligence is also just a tool for biological systems.

We are not “minds in meat suits”. Rather we are meat that has found it occasionally convenient to wield mind.

Day-to-day that doesn’t really change anything, but it’s a perspective that’s going to do more philosophical violence (to politics, religion, ethics and moral philosophy, etc.) than we’ve seen in 163 years.

(This thought cross-posted from the @yak Discord server, where #distributed-systems-studies is having a lively conversation about the new Microsoft GPT-4 paper. You can always join us! https://www.yakcollective.org/join.html)

(And here I mean “intelligence” broadly. Redefining it as “creativity” or “emotional intelligence” or whatever will not save you.)