Today's manmade horror: Bazingas on twitter are amazed that glorified chatbots like GPT-3 can produce readable text that is nominally about whatever topic you request. Say they just spent 20 minutes learning about physics. Say that this makes all existing forms of education obsolete. Say that teachers are no longer needed.
Directly below this someone else posted a prolonged dialogue where the GPT-3 bot calmly explained why a peregrine falcon is the worlds fastest marine mammal. When corrected it said that the sailfish is the fastest marine mammal, explaining that sailfish are warm blooded and have fur.
Bazingas think they can replace teachers (and everything else) with their half-baked machine learning systems because they're so ignorant and uneducated about anything outside their direct field of expertise that they don't actually know what any other disciplines do, or why they do what they do, or even how to evaluate when they're being fed bad knowledge.
Link for dunking.
I don't know, but they tend to also say euphoric things like "humans are just meat computers" and tend to be insufferably smug. :very-intelligent:
Ugh. I am 100% a meat computer guy. I don't think there's a unitary self, I buy in to the idea that our "conscious" mind is mostly an illusion and the real thinking is done by hundreds of interacting non-conscious modules in the brain, I think (with evidence) that our perception of the world is extremely limited and inaccurate and propped up by so many different hacks and shortcuts that it's a wonder we can perceive anything, and I still think these guys are misanthropic shithead creeps.
Who don't understand what they're talking about.
Because whereas I read a very small number of neuroscience articles that I don't understand, they seem to read no neuroscience articles yet very confident in their ability to understand neuroscience.
I'm not making a special case for a soul or whatever straw argument hard determinists might set up for me. What I'm saying is that it's lazy and reductionist to take the human brain and compare it to binary coding. Neurons may have on-off switches but nonetheless have a lot of "maybe" for when they fire, so comparing human computation to binary coding is both reductionist and incorrect. Also, reducing the whole of human thought to chatbot comparisons is similarly lazy and reductionist. I extend that argument to what I've already seen among some online: that chatbots are basically human neural nets already (bullshit) and that people had no worth or right to exist over sufficiently elaborate chatbots made to replace them (fuck off, techbros).
A puppy may be a few cents of common chemicals and be nothing more than those chemicals in an ongoing biological process, but it's like comparing a puppy to a Tamagotchi and claiming that the Tamagotchi is in all meaningful ways the exact same thing as the puppy.
To your credit, you're not one of the insufferably smug eliminative and reductionist pop-nihilist types I'm talking about. I tend to get along with you even if I don't often agree with you.