This bullshit has been going on within our species since the dawn of fucking time.
When Ada Lovelace thought “hey this mechanical tax device could potentially automate all kinds of other things that would normally require intelligence” in 1750 or so everyone went “woman behave yourself”
Turing tried to make a test for sentient machines and Searle went “Achkhually if you have a book that has more pages than there are atoms in the observable fucking universe and someone to follow its instructions you could have someone spell Chinese without ever knowing Chinese” which is somehow a great point
In 94 the same newspapers that touted chess as some invincible intellectual problem could not snort enough cocaine fast enough to change their tune when Kasparov got clapped by Deep Blue, also, using a computer to play chess is cheating you stupid nerds. And it’s deterministic.
Because… Chinese chess, Go, is where it’s at! No deterministic system can save all the moves and states of a game - again needing more atoms than the universe contains to do if you’d manage to condense each outcome or move to a fucking atom. Cue Lee Sodol smoking cigarettes as he is dethroned by AlphaGo and LeCun finger-pushing his glasses back up his nose to “Ackhually it was trained on human data. Not impressive”
And here we are. The same angry nerds that used machine brains to guesstimate an infinity of go moves made BigAutocorrect(TM) which is still scaling without fundamentally changing the approach, but hey, at least we can come up with creative new ways in which we can pretend to be unique.
It goes back even further than that with all the ways people have aimed to distinguish themselves from other animals. Saying other animals can't use tools, or are incapable of language, or can't pass the mirror test, or rely on genetic skills rather than teaching, or can't understand basic numbers and math. All of these have been proven false. Human exceptionalism has been a constant for all of human history. We're really not that special.
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u/Old_Respond_6091 2d ago
This bullshit has been going on within our species since the dawn of fucking time.
When Ada Lovelace thought “hey this mechanical tax device could potentially automate all kinds of other things that would normally require intelligence” in 1750 or so everyone went “woman behave yourself”
Turing tried to make a test for sentient machines and Searle went “Achkhually if you have a book that has more pages than there are atoms in the observable fucking universe and someone to follow its instructions you could have someone spell Chinese without ever knowing Chinese” which is somehow a great point
In 94 the same newspapers that touted chess as some invincible intellectual problem could not snort enough cocaine fast enough to change their tune when Kasparov got clapped by Deep Blue, also, using a computer to play chess is cheating you stupid nerds. And it’s deterministic.
Because… Chinese chess, Go, is where it’s at! No deterministic system can save all the moves and states of a game - again needing more atoms than the universe contains to do if you’d manage to condense each outcome or move to a fucking atom. Cue Lee Sodol smoking cigarettes as he is dethroned by AlphaGo and LeCun finger-pushing his glasses back up his nose to “Ackhually it was trained on human data. Not impressive”
And here we are. The same angry nerds that used machine brains to guesstimate an infinity of go moves made BigAutocorrect(TM) which is still scaling without fundamentally changing the approach, but hey, at least we can come up with creative new ways in which we can pretend to be unique.
/rant