The Third Magic

John Naughton pointed out a thought-provoking post by Noah Smith The third magic, subtitled:

A meditation on history, science, and AI

Smith’s post is followed by a lengthy comment thread by Smith’s well-read audience. Once I got to the end of the comment threads that it inspired, I was struck by two comments that touched on the dangers of treating “Artificial Intelligence” (or should I say, “Machine Learning”) as a black box:

• ChatGPT regularly gives out wrong answers with high conviction. It’d be good if more people saw this as a fundamental problem with the entire concept behind ChatGPT, rather than a minor bug that’ll be worked around in a future release.
• “Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.” (Qouting a William Gibson character from Neuromancer.) Whose finger is on the trigger?

Well worth a read.

[Via Memex 1.1]