6 days Ago
We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity. But here's the truth: it possesses none of those qualities.
It is not human. And presenting it as if it were? That's dangerous. Because it's convincing.
And nothing is more dangerous than a convincing illusion. In particular, general artificial intelligence — the mythical kind of AI that supposedly mirrors human thought — is still science fiction, and it might well stay that way. What we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn't changed much since it was discussed here five years ago).
When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it's been trained on. This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness.
No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less. So why is a real "thinking" AI likely impossible? Because it's bodiless.
It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn't hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there's a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the "hard problem of consciousness". Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more). Given the paramount importance of the human senses and.
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