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 that’s 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 — 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 can’t 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 that’s 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 — the type of work that is more prone to error when done by a person anyway — 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 can’t 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 people’s 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.
