For all its promise and dangers, AI computers plainly can’t think, says critic

[Joe Carillo]

The American philosopher Alva Noë, a University of California-Berkeley professor where he is also the philosophy department chair, says in an essay he wrote for Aeon.com that computers don’t actually do anything--"[t]hey don’t write, or play; they don’t even compute...[w]hich doesn’t mean we can’t play with computers, or use them to invent, or make, or problem-solve--but "[t]he new AI is unexpectedly reshaping ways of working and making, in the arts and sciences, in industry, and in warfare." For this reason, he argues, it is important for us humans "to come to terms with the transformative promise and dangers of this new tech...without succumbing to bogus claims about machine minds."

He then asks with trepidation: "What could ever lead us to take seriously the thought that these devices of our own invention might actually understand, and think, and feel, or that, if not now, then later, they might one day come to open their artificial eyes thus finally to behold a shiny world of their very own? One source might simply be the sense that, now unleashed, AI is beyond our control. Fast, microscopic, distributed and astronomically complex, it is hard to understand this tech, and it is tempting to imagine that it has power over us."

                                    IMAGE CREDIT: AEON.COM

Professor Noë then focuses with great apprehension on "the tendency of some scientists to take for granted what can only be described as a wildly simplistic picture of human and animal cognitive life. They rely unchecked on one-sided, indeed, milquetoast conceptions of human activity, skill and cognitive accomplishment." He then urges the reader to look back to Alan Turing and the very origins of AI--about which Turing dismissed the question "Can machines think?" as "too meaningless to deserve discussion."

Indeed, Professor Noë says that "instead of trying to make a machine that can think, Turing was content to design one that might count as a reasonable substitute for a thinker. Everywhere in Turing’s work, the focus is on imitation, replacement and substitution."

In the same anti-philosophical spirit, Turing proposed that we replace the meaningless question "Can machines think?" with the empirically decidable question "Can machines pass [what has come to be known as] the Turing test? To understand this proposal, we need to look at the test, which Turing called the Imitation Game."

Professor Noë then devotes the rest of his 3,000-word essay to the various ramifications and dangers of Turing's envisioned scenario in which machines might be able to enter into and participate in meaningful human exchange: "Would their ability to do this establish that they can think, or feel, that they have minds as we have minds?"
     
Read in full Professor Alan Noë's wide-ranging cautionary thoughts about AI in "Rage against the machine" in the Aeon.co website now!

Alva Noë is an American philosopher. He is professor at the University of California-Berkeley where he chairs the philosphy department The focus of his work is the theory of perception and consciousness. His books include Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (2015) and The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are (2023).