What does the phenomena of “moving the goalposts” for what counts as AI tell us about AI?
It’s often said that people repeatedly revising their definition of AI, often in response to previous AI tests being passed, is evidence that people are denying/afraid of reality, and want to put their head in the sand or whatever. There’s some truth to that, but that’s a comment about humans and I think it’s overstated.
Closer to what I want to talk about is the idea AI is continuously redefined to mean “whatever humans can do that hasn’t been automated yet”, often taken to be evidence that AI is not a “natural” kind out there in the world, but rather just a category relative to current tech. There’s also truth to this, but not exactly what I’m interested in.
To me, it is startling that (I claim) we have systems today that would likely pass the Turing test if administered by Alan Turing, but that have negligible impact on a global scale. More specifically, consider fine-tuning GPT-4 to mimic a typical human who lacks encyclopedic knowledge of the contents of the internet. Suppose that it’s mimicking a human with average intelligence whose occupation has no overlap with Alan Turing’s expertise.… [continue reading]