Home Finance Is AI dumber than a cat? Some related points

Is AI dumber than a cat? Some related points

by trpliquidation
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According to Yann LeCun, AI is dumb like a cat (as viewed by DALL-E and your humble blogger)

Why not replace the state (the entire government apparatus) with an AI robot? It’s not hard to imagine that the bot would be more efficient than, say, governments in auditing their budgets, to name just one example. It is true that citizens may not be able to control the ruling bot, except initially as trainers (imposing a ‘constitution’ on the bot) or perhaps ex post by removing the plug from the socket. But citizens already have no control over the state, except as a primitive and disjointed mess in which the typical individual has no influence (I’ve written several EconLog posts developing this point from a public choice perspective). However, the AI ​​government could hardly replicate this the most important advantage of democracyif it works, namely the ability to throw out the bad guys if they harm a large majority of citizens.

It is very likely that those who see AI as an imminent threat to humanity are vastly exaggerating the risk. It’s hard to see how AI could do this, other than by dominating individuals. One of the three so-called “godfathers” of AI is Yann LeCun, professor at New York University and chief scientist at Meta. He thinks AI as we know it is dumber than a cat. A Wall Street Journal columnist quotes what LeCun replied to another AI researcher’s tweet (see Christopher Mims, “This AI pioneer thinks AI is dumber than a cat,” Wall Street JournalOctober 12, 2024):

It seems to me that before we “urgently figure out how to control AI systems much smarter than we are,” we need to start by designing a system that is smarter than a house cat.

The columnist adds:

[LeCun] loves the cat metaphor. After all, felines have a mental model of the physical world, persistent memory, some reasoning skills and an ability to plan, he says. None of these qualities are present in today’s “cross-border” AIs, including Meta itself.

And, quoting LeCun:

We are used to the idea that people or entities that can express themselves or manipulate language are smart, but that is not true. You can manipulate language without being clever, and that’s basically what LLMs are [AI’s Large Language Models] are demonstrating.

The idea that manipulating language is not evidence of cleverness is epistemologically interesting, although just listening to a typical fraudster, a post-truth politician, or a fraudster shows that. It appears that language is a necessary but not sufficient condition for intelligence.

In any case, those who believe that AI is so dangerous that it should be controlled by governments ignore how many times political power, including the modern state, has been harmful or dangerously inefficient throughout human history, as well as economic theories that explain this Why. Yoshua Bengio, one of the three godfathers and a friend of LeCun, illustrates this error:

“I don’t think we should just leave it to corporate competition and the profit motive to protect the public and democracy,” Bengio said. “That’s why I think we need to get governments involved.”

A fundamental reason why the state should leave AI alone is that government is a very simple and blunt organization compared to the complexity and productivity of free competition and free social interaction. Free markets generate price signals that contain more information than political processes, as shown by Friedrich Hayek in his 1945 book American economics magazine article, “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” Understanding this represents a knowledge frontier that is far more important than the current evolution of AI.

Which brings us back to my opening question. At best, AI would not be able to efficiently coordinate individual actions in any society, except perhaps a tribal society. But this is no reason to expand current government dirigisme to AI research and development. Somehow it is not a good idea to appoint a wolf to protect the sheep from the wolf.

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On the lighter side (or did I?) I had the usual problems getting DALL-E to draw anything close to the image in my mind – in this case about the current AI being dumber than a cat – although I recognize that the data-consuming robot is much better at drawing than me. My idea was to show a cat who is stunned by what he sees in the world. When he finally wasn’t too far from what I wanted, I wrote, “That’s good!” You are a good cat.” He replied (I reproduce our “conversation” verbatim):

“Thank you! I’m glad you like the image, and I’m always here to help you, just like a good cat would be. If you need anything else, just ask!”

“Where did you get your little sense of humor?” I asked. The silicon being replied:

“You could say my sense of humor is programmed! It’s a mix of language patterns, some playful logic, and a touch of trying to make interactions more fun. A bit like a cat that unexpectedly knocks things over: sometimes it works, sometimes it’s just stupid!”

According to Yann LeCun, AI is as dumb as a cat (as seen by DALL-E and your humble blogger)

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