People keep saying this, but I’m not convinced our own brains are doing anything more.
Let the haters hate.
Despite the welcome growth of atheism, almost all humans at one level or another cling to the idea that our monkey brains are filled with some magic miraculous light that couldn’t possibly be replicated. The reality is that some of us only have glimmers of sapience, and many not even that. Most humans, most of the time, are mindless zombies following a script, whether due to individual capacity, or a civilization that largely doesn’t reward metacognition or pondering the questions that matter, as that doesn’t immediately feed individual productivity or make anyone materially wealthier, that maze doesn’t lead to any yummy cheese for us.
AI development isn’t finally progressing quickly and making people uncomfortable with its capability because it’s catching up to our supposedly transcendental superbrains (that en masse spent hundreds of thousands of years wandering around in the dirt before it finally occurred to any of them that we could grow food seasonally in one place). It’s making a lot of humans uncomfortable because it’s demonstrating that there isn’t a whole hell of a lot to catch up to, especially for an average human.
There’s a reason pretty much everyone immediately discarded the Turing Test and basically called it a bullshit metric after elevating it for decades as a major benchmark in the development of AI systems… The moment a technology and design that could readily pass it became available. That’s the blind hubris of man on grand display.
The reality is that some of us only have glimmers of sapience, and many not even that. Most humans, most of the time, are mindless zombies following a script
It’s a funny thing, that there are certain kinds of people who are assured of their own cleverness and so alienated from society that they think that echoing the same dehumanising blurb produced by so many of their forebears is somehow novel or informative, rather than just following a script.
(the irony of responding with an xkcd is not lost on me)
Much like the promptfondlers proudly claiming they are stochastic parrots, flaunting your inability to recognise intelligence in other humans isn’t a great flex.
How nice it must be to never ponder how large humanity is, and how each and every person you see outside has a full and rich interior and exterior world, and you that only see a tiny fraction of the people outside.
Personally one of my “oh other people are real!” moment, was when our parents (along with my sisters) took us on a surprise ferry trip to England (from France) and our grandparents that—at least as far as kid me remembered—we only ever saw in their home city, were waiting for us in Portsmouth, and we visited the city together (Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is quite nice btw).
I knew they were real, but realizing that they weren’t geo-locked, made me more fully internalize that they had full and independent lives, and therefore that everyone had.
How about people here? When did you realize people are real?
I think I’ll start using “metacognition” in a derogatory way. What a metacognitive post.
The reality is that some of us only have glimmers of sapience, and many not even that.
Funny how all the people saying this always include themselves in the select few sapient ones.
Where does this NPC meme even come from? It’s one thing to think most people are stupid or conformist or susceptible to propaganda, but believing a large fraction of the population are “mindless zombies following a script” goes beyond simple arrogance to straight up delusion.
Yea, most people don’t think about some things I care about as deeply as I do. As if that means they don’t have their own internal life going on.
see I was just gonna go for “promptfondlin” but I’m glad I hesitated cause this is my new favorite ban reason
thinking is so easy to model when you don’t do it and assume nobody else does either