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Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

I find things like the Chinese Room Argument quite persuasive for the idea that computers will be able to think and understand. If the opponents to that idea have spent decades trying to disprove it and the Room argument is the best they can come up with then there probably aren't any decent refutations.

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There's a simple argument. Computers are machines and hence passive. They are programmed, they are run, etc. but whatever they think, i came up with. If you [read] this, it's logically and grammatically sound to assume, that's not the display, the cpu or whatever speaking to you, but me, throwupper247, a person. We are talking about personification and that's an issue much older than AI.

But isn't the point of AI that it trains itself from input? Not from what you tell it. I thought of having a baby and my wife agreed; whatever this baby thinks, we came up with? Clearly not. It learns from the world on its own.

The NN doesn't train itself, you train it, whereas the baby is first of all traines with intrinsic stimuli, its consciousness and emotions. Sure, you might not exactly know how the NN works either, but there's a middle ground between deterministic shells driven by higher forces and inexplicable black-boxes. ...

Semantic quibbling. I have to hold my baby's hand at first too. Doesn't matter who is the conduit for the inputs; the AI is learning from them and not from me.

No you don't always have to, it has emotions all by itself, as you said. You are unable to make a connection from holding its hand to being responsible for its actions? Actions include holding hands as well as thinking? What's in question overall is the degree of activity.

Sure It's not black and white, but it won't ever be exacrly the same for living beings and machines. As said before, Animism is an old hat.

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