Thread by @SteB777

"AI can spontaneously develop human-like communication, study finds"

This is largely stuff and nonsense.

1/theguardian.com/technology/202…

Firstly, AI is essentially machine learning all the books and literature written by human beings, so it is pretty obvious that these AI programmes will learn the pattern of how people write and verbally reason, and what they have written.
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The stuff these AI machines are trained on contains all these written and verbal norms or patterns. So it'd be pretty useless if it didn't learn it, and learn to mimic the material it's trained with. This synthetic stuff, is very different to actual human communication.
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As I've repeatedly tried to explain, it is very easy and regular in the map territory relationship, to confuse the map with the territory. Here, AI is just learning about maps, not the actual territory. It's classic mistaking the map for the territory.

4/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80…

In other words, AI can learn the way people explain things and communicate, but it cannot understand the deeper patterns of the human mind, which are not in words, and have never been properly explained in writing.
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How can I be so certain of this.

Well I have almost complete anauralia i.e. I have no verbal monologue, and I'm not aware of words or verbal reasoning, until I speak or write.

6/threadreaderapp.com/thread/1752682…

However, just because I have no inner monologue, does not mean I'm unaware of the inner working of my mind, it is just not verbal, and is only converted verbally, when I speak or write.
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People are mistaking that chattering internal monologue, with their mind. No, language is a very crude and inadequate way of explaining, insight, how the mind works etc.
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All this is well known in philosophy, psychology and cognitive science, even if lots of practitioners of it, don't contemplate the implications of this. I haven't got the space or time to go into the map territory relationship here.
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Here, the map means the symbolic representation of anything, not just an actual map. Territory means the actual reality. The territory isn't merely much more complex, most of it unknown, like the map, but a symbolic representation of something is a different thing entirely.
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Even if you had the most complex map or symbolic representation of something, it would never be, and never become the territory, or the reality itself.

The rather silly fiction, when some AI representation, becomes manifest reality, is impossible. It's total fantasy.
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We don't fully understand the particles, the atomic and space time structure of the stuff we call matter, and I actually think we're a very long way from understanding it. So you can't reconstruct it with symbolic representation, which doesn't understand its true structure.
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As we use symbolic representation for commercial purposes, industry, finance, administration, government, media, AI could do a lot of that. But that ain't reality, it's all abstract.
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Take the natural world, organisms, non-living natural systems and structure, which includes our bodies, are fundamentally different to symbolic representation, no matter how sophisticated it is.
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This is why idiot politicians, economists, oligarchs etc, naively think we can deal with and adapt to climate change, biodiversity loss etc. AI doesn't even come close to understanding the reality of what we call nature, and it never will.
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I haven't even come close to explaining my critique of this pretty crude logical fallacy error, of mistaking the map for the territory. Perhaps it's impossible to explain it all in writing (not reality, just the fallacy of mistaking reality for symbolic representation).
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