Re: GPT-3 and the chinese room

Posted by Frank Wimberly-2 on Jul 21, 2020; 8:29pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/GPT-3-and-the-chinese-room-tp7597858p7597859.html

Re:  Chinese Room

I mentioned the Chinese Room thought experiment to my erstwhile boss, a bona fide philosopher.  His reaction, "Anything follows from a false premise.". I think he meant that having a room full of Chinese scholars who laboriously execute a complex algorithm they don't understand is preposterous.  Maybe something like that reasoning caused you to react disdainfully when you did.

On Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 2:22 PM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just for any old cf:
https://analyticsindiamag.com/open-ai-gpt-3-code-generator-app-building/

Someone mentioned in a recent thread, here, the Chinese Room thought experiment, to which my reaction is always "Bah! That's nothing but a loaded question" ... like "have you stopped beating your child?" But the truth is, my answer to the Chinese Room is that it *is* intelligent. GPT-3 is nothing but the Chinese Room. Similarly, all we are is deep memory machines trained up on huge datasets. At some point, I've made the argument that the demonstration of *understanding* can't be made through language. As fond as I am of repeating back someone's expression in one's own words to demonstrate you grokked their point, *ultimately* the only demonstration of understanding that I really accept is in the *doing* or the *making* of stuff.

Now, there's some prestidigitation behind debuild.co. But at first blush, here is a machine that *understands* the website specification well enough to actually code the website. The AI skeptics will move the goalposts, of course, as they always do. E.g. they can say that programming a website to meet specs isn't a big deal, we've had declarative and domain-specific languages for awhile. And web pages and programming languages are all purely linguistic anyway. But it's a short trip from here to, say, a CNC machine, a 3D printer, a script for a light show, or even algorithmic composition of music.

I'm reminded of people who are expert at some task, like playing baseball or whatever, but when asked *how* they do what they do, they're at a loss ... tacit but no reflective understanding ... like a cat not really recognizing itself in a mirror, where dolphins do.

What's actually missing in the machines we berate as being mindless algorithms is not general intelligence or universal computation. It's general-purpose sensorimotor sytems ... universal manipulation ... hands with thumbs, tightly coupled feedback loops like our sense of touch, excruciatingly sensitive data fusion organelles like olfactory bulbs, etc. I think I can argue that's what gives us "understanding" ... not whatever internal computation we're capable of.


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↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

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