Artificial Intelligence
How Appearances can be Deceptive if we Think Like Creationists>
According to a McKinsey report, depending on the adoption scenario, automation will displace between 400 and 800 million jobs by 2030, requiring up to 375 million people to change job categories entirely.
Readers may have noticed how I've been using the AI chatGPT3 engine recently. I find it incredibly useful for quickly generating information about a topic. The one drawback seems to be that its references don't always check out and it's sometimes impossible to find the paper of book referenced, even. This seems to be a major deficit in its training.
I found it invaluable in developing the coding needed to run the slideshows I'm now frequently including in these posts, although I often needed to remind it of the objective because its solutions were overly complex and sometimes didn't work as I wanted. It also tends to misunderstand the specification and solve a problem that doesn't exist.
But, as the following article by Neil Saunders, Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Greenwich, points out, there is a natural tendency to treat it like a real human being. I have to admit, I often say please and thank you, and sometimes hesitate before asking it yet again for help, half expecting it to become impatient. This is, of course, a mistake as an algorithm doesn't have emotions and isn't even conscious of its own existence, let alone being 'human' in its interactions with us. It simply responds to our input by pattern-matching and generating output in intelligible English.
And this is what makes it so human; it talks to us like a very polite and infinitely patient human being would. This tendency to assume agency is deeply embedded in our evolved psychology in the form of teleological thinking and explain why credulous creationists assume whatever they don't understand or what isn't immediately obvious, must be the work of an agency of some sort. I have even had creationists argue that atoms can't combine with other atoms, or photons don't know where to go, unless directed to do so by a sentient being - which of course assumes that atoms and elementary particles are sentient and can obey instructions too. Teleological thinking is the basic notion behind 'intelligent design' and arguments from design, such as the refuted Palley's Watch analogy.
It is a simple step then to assume that the 'designer' or directing agent must be the locally popular god, despite the fact that there is no definitive evidence that any god(s) exists or mechanism that could explain the origins of any. The argument is childishly circular - there must be a designer because things look designed; the designer must be God because only God can design things; the 'fact' of design proves the existence of a designer - And of course mummy and daddy believe in the only true god.
But there are dangers in using AI combined with teleological thinking and ignorant credulity because people who think teleologically can be manipulated and those who believe absurdities can be persuaded to commit atrocities.
Here then is what Neil Saunders has to say on the subject. His article is reprinted from
The Conversation under a Creative Commons Licence, reformatted for stylistics consistency:
