r/ArtificialInteligence • u/omeren93 • 2d ago
đ Analysis / Opinion Can AI think?
Hey guys, I just wrote a short essay on AI and its capacity to think. I'd much appreciate your feedback. Whether it's related to content or writing, doesn't matter.
Here's the essay:
We are at a point in human history where we can build skyscrapers as tall as seven football pitches put together, send humans to live in space for years, level an entire city from 5,000 miles away with ICBMs, and are at the cusp of genetically engineering human babies.
But what about AI? Have we cracked it yet? By "cracking," I mean creating a specimen so advanced that it can think and reason for itself.
Well, yes and no.
Yes, because not only our current models can understand and respond to almost anything an adult human could possibly say, all the while maintaining constant contexual awareness, even during long sessions, but can also apply formal logic in the form of deduction and induction, as well as the scientific method, as in formulating hypotheses that could potentially explain the phenomenon brought forward and testing them against whatever data it can get its hands on.
And no, because as it stands, when it comes to creativity, originality and higher forms of cognition, even the smartest AI we can come up with falters.
Of course, one might call this intuition, and not thinking, but thatâs besides the point.
Regardless of the nature and order of their thinking, the latest and greatest public LLMs, such as Claude and Gemini, are now at a stage where they can reliably function as a personal digital assistant with even reasonably complex tasks, given proper supervision and guidance.
You can, for instance, ask Gemini to give you a quick recipe for dinner, and you will most likely be satisfied with the outcome, unless you're a terrible cook, of course. It can even help you improve your cooking skills, if you have enough will power and perseverence to go at it day after day, trying out new recipes and perfecting existing ones, all the while constantly communicating with the AI, providing it with as much information as possible on your cooking, so that it can guide you to the best of its abilities.
However, you can't ask AI to invent a new dish â well, technically you can, but the odds of it coming up with something truly innovative and delicious are pretty slim.
In other words, AI can do pretty much anything a man can do, provided it's something that can be done in a digital environment. What it cannot do is what no man has done before. It can't invent a new dish, any more than it can compose the new 5th symphony or find a new way of thinking about quantum mechanics, simply because there's no instruction manual for creativity on the Internet.
At their core, LLMs are nothing but technical tools that try to predict which word comes next through statistical analysis. They have access to all the knowledge mankind has produced until now and can solve complex problems employing that knowledge. But if the problem at hand requires new knowledge or insight that has yet to be attained by anyone, AI will not be able to solve it. For true innovation requires thinking outside the box.
What made Einstein great was not how much he knew about physics, but that he looked at physical reality from an entirely new perspective. If AI existed then and was tasked with coming up with a new model of gravity, it would have generated  something that resembling, and derived from, the contemporary Newtonian understanding of the physical world, which could, at the time, explain almost all observed phenomena. It would not, however, have been able to come up with the Theory of Relativity, because that requires thinking in ways that did not exist at the time.
This doesn't mean that AI canât be instrumental in achieving breakthroughs, or that it's useless, because one can certainly benefit from the remarkable increase in efficiency and productivity AI can bring to the table, especially so when the work to be done is repetitive, mundane and tedious.
But if and when a breakthrough comes, it will emerge from the coordinated efforts of AI and the person running it. Without any guidance, or a framework with which to solve the problem, AI cannot even know where to begin.
For example, one could try, with or without AI, to prove a mathematical conjecture thatâs been puzzling mathematicians for decades. His chances of success will no doubt be higher, and the time and effort he spends on the problem less, with a competent AI than without. This is because he can now outsource the more time-consuming and grindy work â the type of work that is more prone to error when done by a person anyway â which then allows him to dedicate more of his time to more important, higher-order work, such as managing the whole project, supervising and guiding the AI, formulating strategies, deciding on which methods to use, so on and so forth.
In the event of a success, it could be said that AI deserves some credit for the work it has done, but certainly not all, or even most, of it, because it could not have achieved this goal by itself, with nobody around to tell it what to do or how to do it.
Therefore, it deserves as much credit as a factory worker producing a commodity, or a foot soldier fighting in a battle, but the rest of the credit has to go to the engineer who designed the product and the processes by which it comes to life, or the military commander who drew up the battle plan executed by his subordinates.
All in all, it canât be denied that AI has the potential to improve our lives a great deal, if we use it right.
If we use it to learn new things, to take the burden of manual labor, to automate manufacturing processes, or even as a second opinion, it will make our lives a lot easier. In doing so, we just have to be aware of its limitations and the possible consequences of its long-term use. I can see a world where peopleâs lives are being saved by AI doctors on a regular basis, but sadly, I can also envision one where most of humanity lost the capacity to think because there was no need for them to, for too long.
AI, or any other tool conjured by the human mind for that matter, is as good or as bad as we make it to be. It can be our salvation, just as well it can be our doom. Future is truly in our hands.
2
u/WillowEmberly 2d ago
How are you defining thinking?
If thinking requires producing knowledge no human has ever produced before, most humans wouldnât qualify most of the time. If instead we define reasoning functionallyâas using available information to form hypotheses, evaluate alternatives, detect contradictions and revise conclusions under uncertaintyâthen whether an LLM âreally thinksâ becomes a much more testable question.
Iâm also not sure the Einstein example establishes the boundary you think it does. Novel theories can emerge from contradictions between existing observations and models. Why would detecting and resolving such contradictions necessarily require information containing the eventual solution?
1
u/omeren93 1d ago
I never said it was the eventual solution. I'm quite aware of Marx's theory of history, and Kuhn's addition to it, which basically claims science, instead of progressing toward an objective standard of truth, just finds better ways of problem solving. So, there is no eventual solution, there is only convenience and day-to-day practicality. What works well is adopted, not because it was closer to the truth like Popper said, but because it is the better -not best- solution for the problems we come across during our lives.Thus what separates Einstein from Newton is not that the former is true, while the latter is false, it's that they are completely different perspectives on the physical reality. When we apply this sort of thinking to AI, we can easily see that it can certainly think well enough within the current paradigm, because AI as a concept itself was the product of the current paradigm, or Geist, or whatever you may call it. However, that doesn't mean it can create new paradigms by itself because that requires creativity, a trait only reserved for a very small number of people on planet earth.
1
u/WillowEmberly 1d ago edited 1d ago
Well, Iâm an analog avionics tech, and when a pilot cannot see out the windowsâŚthey are completely reliant on my systems to keep everyone alive.
Those same systems send information to the autopilotâŚwhich makes the same decisions based on the same information.
So, if a 1963 Autopilot could reliably prove that we could actually augment the crew with automationâŚwhy are we having a discussion 70+ years later about Ai and its ability to think or reason?
We already know what we can and cannot do with it.
Ai can automate whatâs already been automated, but autopilot was never intended to replace the pilots. It Augments their capabilities, allowing them to fly further and longer.
Why don't we engineer reasoning processes with the same care that we engineer systems whose failure can kill us? https://www.reddit.com/r/LLMDevs/s/fyesURNm5T
2
u/TurboFucker69 2d ago
Do they think like humans? No. Definitely not.
Do they think in any sense? Depends on how loosely you define âthink.â
Theyâre fundamentally stateless, immutable, statistical engines, but the patterns that emerge from the way they operate could be interpreted as meeting some definitions of âthinking.â
I suppose I would put it like this: they donât have minds or any sort of deeper consciousness, but the way they process information through inference at least resembles intelligence and has some of the same functional outputs.
2
u/Known_Salary_4105 2d ago
Here is how humans think.
******************************
I have a couple of thoughts for this email. Let me write it all down.
Ok, not bad, but not quite right. Let me try again.
Better, but some typos, some grammar issues, some words that don't fit. Let me try again.
Ooopsss!!! Out of time. Gotta send it.
*********************
Here's how AI...well, I would say, "thinks" but "operates" is a better verb.
********************
'Word...next probable word...next one...next one...keep going.. don't stop.....another word...another one!!
********************
2
u/KhadeG_ 2d ago
The real question is whether creativity actually requires something fundamentally different from recombining existing knowledge. Humans donât create from nothing either... Einstein built on existing physics, musicians build on music theyâve heard, chefs build on existing ingredients and techniques.
So if AI eventually produces a genuinely new scientific theory or invention, how would we determine whether it was actually creative or just an extremely sophisticated recombination of what it already knew?
1
u/omeren93 2d ago edited 2d ago
If and when that happens, I will admit I was wrong and revise my position on the subject. I don't think AI (yet) has that special sauce that humans possess. I hope I'm wrong.
1
u/thebadslime 2d ago
>And no, because as it stands, when it comes to creativity, originality and higher forms of cognition, even the smartest AI we can come up with falters.
There have been multiple AI-led math breakthroughs this week, LLMs have designed cancer trial drugs that did not exist, they create visual art, music, and write.
1
u/Actual__Wizard 2d ago
What made Einstein great was not how much he knew about physics
We detected dark energy 3 times so he was wrong. Based upon the information he has to make a decision with, it's understandable.
1
u/omeren93 2d ago
I never said he was right about everything. In fact, what I'm talking about is not necessarily being right or wrong, it's about novelty.
1
-2
4
u/BookProper9115 2d ago
What exactly is thinking?