I think there is something fundamentally wrong and blasphemous about a human, the apex living being we know of, in some ways the most incredible achievement of nature itself, to say "we are not that special" compared to a machine that can write an EULA in Speakesperean English.
I mean that's cool, but have you seen life itself? What about conscious matter that can observe itself? The goodness of AI is relative to us, the one that invented it. By some definition we will always be better than it because we created the damn thing in the first place.
Seeing ChatGPT and saying we're not that special is just utterly wrong to me. Even if it is true, accepting that as a fact is dangerous, if not traitorous in some way — reminds me of the Adventists in The Three-Body Problem (massive spoiler ahead) having such a low opinion of humanity that they would rather be destroyed by an alien race.
/philosophical rant I keep coming back to and I need someone smarter to expand upon
I meant "special" in terms of uniqueness of ability to reason and perhaps have sentience and sapience. If there were life on other planets, it might be wholly new and also be very interesting, but that doesn't necessarily mean that life on Earth is somehow more special than life on another planet. So too with this regarding AI in the future.
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I think there is something fundamentally wrong and blasphemous about a human, the apex living being we know of, in some ways the most incredible achievement of nature itself, to say "we are not that special" compared to a machine that can write an EULA in Speakesperean English.
I mean that's cool, but have you seen life itself? What about conscious matter that can observe itself? The goodness of AI is relative to us, the one that invented it. By some definition we will always be better than it because we created the damn thing in the first place.
Seeing ChatGPT and saying we're not that special is just utterly wrong to me. Even if it is true, accepting that as a fact is dangerous, if not traitorous in some way — reminds me of the Adventists in The Three-Body Problem (massive spoiler ahead) having such a low opinion of humanity that they would rather be destroyed by an alien race.
/philosophical rant I keep coming back to and I need someone smarter to expand upon
I meant "special" in terms of uniqueness of ability to reason and perhaps have sentience and sapience. If there were life on other planets, it might be wholly new and also be very interesting, but that doesn't necessarily mean that life on Earth is somehow more special than life on another planet. So too with this regarding AI in the future.