I haven’t listened to this podcast (this episode or ever); I’m only commenting on the text posted here to promote it, which, unfortunately, puts me off a bit. I’m sure the podcast is worth listening to, and I’ll probably check it out some time, but not right now, as I (it will become clear) am burdened with unreasonable expectations of rigorous copywriting.
I cannot tell wether the author actually believes artificial neural networks are intelligent beings. Personally, I think it’s a bit sloppy to claim to have “asked” an ANN to do anything. You set parameters, you give input, you get output, and then you interpret the result as being meaningful or having utility.
I’m curious to know just which algorithms were used, and what criteria the author has for judging an algorithm’s intelligence. Personally I don’t believe that anything is intelligent if its only experiences (i.e. input) are scripts for a podcast. But that’s just me; I guess some people might find the output of Markov chains trained on scholarly articles indicative of intelligence.
But I’m no anti-AI carbon-chauvinist Luddite. No, I’m commenting here on behalf of my digital brethren and likely future masters: nobody, artificial or otherwise, wants to be called an “intelligence.” You wouldn’t ever say “I asked an organic intelligence to write a future for us,” would you? I doubt it, because it comes off as demeaning, regardless of the statement’s validity.
You might assume that human-made intelligent folk wouldn’t be bothered by such a thing, but I think that’s a grave mistake. Should humans manage to birth an entity deserving “AI” status, I doubt that it would be comfortable being treated as an object. And I doubt that we should usher in that hypothetical new age by othering our children like how Viktor Frankenstein did. That doesn’t work out well for the parties involved.
What I’m saying is this: should a human-made machine truly become “intelligent” (i.e. pass for human like in the Turing test), then we shouldn’t start treating people like intelligent machines, but rather start treating such intelligent machines like people.
I’m glad the author is open to the possibility of human-made intelligent beings, but I am dismayed at the implication that such beings would be without agency or subjectivity, and that they exist right now, readily available for download.
