> On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Maybe that member of the Parliament wanted to know if the machine is intelligent enough to reason about their inputs. Nobody born in the last 50 years would ask that question about computers, because we know that they are dumb electrical circuits. Basically nobody had that kind of insight about the mechanical computing machines of the time, when that question was asked.
However somebody born in the last few years might start to ask that question again now, because today's machines seem to reason.
If 30 years ago I asked a truck enthusiast: "If there's a car in front of me on the highway and I slam on the accelerator and don't touch the brakes, will the truck slow down before collision or am I going to crash into the car?" - Trucker in 1993: "I can't even." Truck today: *brakes*.
""If I ask for something I don't want, will it give me something I want??" - no
Not all the time, no — but ChatGPT 3.5 is much better at that exact thing than Google or responses from StackOverflow etc. users.
It is certainly expected. From the wrong value of iron in spinach, to prejudice, to incomplete knowledge...
“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”
No one besides political opponents mentioned bleach and yet it is repeated ad-nauseum, so yes I'm positive that just like uninformed or over-socialized humans, LLMs can be fed incorrect information that causes them to output incorrect information.
I'm very lucky that my best half is so emotionally-savvy that some of it has rubbed off on me. I just wish that civility could be taught from early ages; so much worldwide bitterness could be avoided.
Still, it's interesting to know how far back some of the basic issues of computing go.
Well, software otoh could be both dumb and brilliant.
I’d argue this is a radically off-base generalization that’s as bad or worse than what you’re arguing against. Pop outside your tech bubble and you’ll see that what you claimed is definitively not true. In fact, many people actually see tech today, especially things like LLMs / AI, in the same ways that Parliament person did back then.
That MP could have been making reasonable use of the filter for an era in which a learned person would know that such a machine should be possible, but not if technology is there yet.
Also HTML parsing and Postel’s law. To me, that’s the real “billion-dollar mistake”.
obviously you have never had a tech support job
Working in enterprise with lots of contact with management of the business units that are the customers for the software we develop and maintain, like about 1/4 of the questions I get are different versions of that one underneath various thin disguises.
EDIT: to be fair, a number of the people I work with were not (as I myself, just barely, was not) born in the last 50 years. But if anything, the question of the form at issue are more common from the younger non-technical folks, not the older ones. Intuitive understanding of what computers do seems, IME, to have peaked around the “Xennial” border sub-generation, but even then not be that high in the general public.
Artificial Inteligence implies that its intelligent and currently, its not - its just a computer program, with all the foibles and difficulties of any other computer program.
I run into this problem in my day job, yes, it looks like an appliance, but its still a computer and may need to be rebooted, you still need to practice good hygiene with it, and restart the application and or the operating system.
People have no compunction about restarting their PC, and do not get upset when Excel has an issue, but they panic when the thing they think of as an appliance freaks out. Just reboot it, and let me know if it happens again in the same way.
Dunno about anyone else but it's usually a sign something has gone very wrong or about to go very wrong if I start seeing this on a modern PC. Don't consider "just reboot it" should be an expectation, get the same annoyance when a webdev tells me "It works if you reload it" nah they just means your code has issues.
Looking at recent developments, I'm not sure this assertion can be accepted without doubt. I would argue that LLMs like Chat GPT are definitely "intelligent" for many meanings of the word.
They are not intelligent in exactly the same way we are, and they are very limited in what they can do, but there does seem to be some real reasoning going on.
What a system experiences internally can never be confirmed by external entities. So I guess the best way to determine intelligence, reasoning, consciousness, is to ask them if they are intelligent, can perform reasoning and if they possess a consciousness.
Except the demanding ones. Those for which you would judge something as "intelligent" or not. Beyond appearance.
> I guess the best way ... is to ask them
Not differently from asking a piece of paper and reading "Yes I am".
Except you have to wonder who wrote it there :)
It only implies it does something """intelligent""", where 'intelligent' must be read intelligently.
There could be a wide range of interpretation of the words in that phrase. And every argument along these lines usually involves people with different interpretations or different background assumptions or tech savviness.
To some those words could imply Intelligence of the Artificial thing - ie a non natural intelligence that is still intelligent.
To others, it could imply that the Intelligence of the thing is Artificial - ie an imitation of intelligence and not real intelligence. HackerNews readers probably fall into this category.
There's probably more ways.
A little bit like how some people get wound up between Disabled Person and Person with Disabilities etc to try and distinguish between them.
This might be a bit of a silly take, but this is basically what my experience with search engines sometimes is like.
I might spell something the wrong way, or try to describe what I'm looking for in ways that aren't entirely correct, or even attempt to solve the wrong problem, but end up with the correct results anyways.
A lot of it is due to human generated content, no doubt (like someone explaining that a person probably wants to install a different software package to achieve a desired result instead of using another incorrectly), but there's definitely something nice to be said about the algorithms ranking results for a given query, at least before financial incentives enter the picture.
I'm a couple centuries late, but I think "kind of confusion" might be a confusion of brain-dead calculation for intelligence. A person can frequently identify "wrong" input and either correct it or refuse to answer, while a calculating machine never can.