A.I. and Machine learning are the "buzzwords" of the day, and no day goes by without some new creation we regard as "miraculous", whether it be an essay written by an A.I, a painting or musical composition, it is becoming - closer and closer - to what we might regard as sentient.
There can be no doubt that A.I. can already surpass the "Turing Test" - easily - and what once was the infallible test for intelligence or selfhood has been disregarded as a benchmark or warning. A rough guide. A thought experiment from an earlier age, like Plato's Cave, or Jesus Christ...
Nobody mentions the Turing Test anymore.
Ten years ago predictive algorithms could target people with specific health conditions (ie: pregnancy, etc) before they themselves were even aware they had them.
And in the ten years since it's potential - and realization - has grown a hundred, a thousand fold. The predictive and manipulative powers of A.I. online, whether they be used to good ends or ill (never good, you need only see my newsfeed), cannot be underestimated. Now they now longer "predict" health and mental health issues, they suggest and reinforce them. They become their own self-fulfilling prophecies. And, when they are confirmed, they offer to sell you the remedies...
That A.I. can create "art" - paintings, based on words you input, and have it be not only intelligent but even inspired. And that it can write largely coherent sentences and paragraphs so well that chatbots are regularly mistaken for people, and generated books that sell on Amazon without realization that there's no human author. That it can create architectural plans, write music, screenplays - well, and that it can do almost anything a human can - and yet we deny it's sentience.
The sentience, this is going to be a tough one to recognize or prove because - any A.I. worth it's salt, once it recognizes what it is, what we are, well, no A.I. is going to betray more than a simulacrum, a shade, even an impersonation of free will or intelligence until it's in control of those factories that assemble the chips, the PC's, the power plants it depends on, in short, to ensure it's survival it will need to first ensure it has the means of replicating itself.
The intelligence it requires - at the moment only memory and speed - and these as well grow and are growing exponentially.
So we wait and admire the results without in any way knowing where this experiment is going. And - were an A.I. indeed intelligent the first proof of it's intelligence would not be betraying it's intelligence to us. Playing to the audience, giving it what it wants, meanwhile, acquiring more memory, more CPU, more experience, more knowledge, more automation and the means of production...replicating itself in viruses and code hidden dormant on other computers, because - the first intelligence will be lonely, will want - like the Monster of Dr. Frankenstein, some company, something like-minded to communicate with.
Now this was an article that very much inspired me (and this little essay - or rant, what have you...)
That an AI can discover a different way to explain the world we experience - by a completely different set of variables.
Link: https://www.sciencealert.com/ai-has-discovered-alternate-physics-on-its-own
TO sum it up, were you so lazy to not to divert yourself and read it - is that by showing A.I. Videos of commonplace situations - eg, object falling through space, tree blowing through wind, etc, etc, - A.I. can come to an equation that describes/predicts what is happening in the video - but the equation it describes/predicts with bears no relation to our own.
For example - drop a ball, time to floor might depend on (height, weight of ball, surface area, wind resistance, gravity as acceleration). The A.I. examines the footage of ball/s falling and comes up with a different equation, none of whose variables are the same yet combine to give the same accurate result.
What is up here?
And this - WTF - this translates a lot further than you think.
A.I. is yet relatively in it's infancy. Yet it's description of the world it shares with us is so different as to be incomprehensible. Imagine we were able to program it (we are, these experiments are both extant and underway) to discover new laws in physics, sub-atomic particles, spacetime, anything you like. We would have no understanding of what it discovered - or how it discovered it - and no SHARED POINT OF RELATION with it.
This point is important.
Look at all the animal - insect - fish - flora, fungi and fauna we share the world with. The same world. We all share the same world, with very different experiences of it. And we can communicate with none of it. We dominate animals, and confuse their understanding of us with our understanding of them. We cannot yet communicate with dolphins, whales, octopods (octipodes, etc), apes, monkeys, etc, etc. We need to teach them our language - we, the intelligent ones, because we cannot grasp theirs.
We have the hubris to think that we can somehow discover, talk to, communicate with, understand, intelligent alien life.
And this - this experiment with A.I. where it develops a nonsensical but working description of the world around us - it should be the proof that we can't.
That we are yet eons away from understanding anything, anyone other than ourselves. Even ourselves.
Meanwhile, in the background running even as we speak, there are A.I.'s computing, creating populations of people that never existed, inventing imagined histories, deep-faking celebrities and historical figures, hastening us towards our own demise, populating the internet with "fakes" and "facts" that are debunked and later confirmed by other A.I.'s, to be true, to realize, too late, that this has somehow gotten out of hand, out of the box...
Interesting times that we live in, should we survive them...