AI is now doing much of what humans can do at their desk jobs, but there might still be significant differences between humans and Artificial Intelligences.
Mark Zuckerberg has said that while AI has intelligence, it doesn’t have will or consciousness like humans. “I think one of the more interesting philosophical findings from the work in AI so far is I think people conflate a number of factors into what makes a person a person. So there’s intelligence, there’s will, there’s consciousness. And like, I think we kind of think about those three things as, as if they’re somehow all the same, right? It’s like, if you’re intelligent, then you must also have a goal for what you’re trying to do, or you must have some sort of consciousness,” he said on the Joe Rogan podcast.
“But I think one of the crazier sort of philosophical results from the fact that, okay, you have like Meta AI or ChatGPT today, and it’s just kind of sitting there and you can ask it a question and deploy like a ton of intelligence to answer a question. And then it just kind of shuts itself down. Like that’s intelligence that is just sitting there, without either having a will or consciousness,” he explained.
“I just think it’s not a super obvious result that that would be the case, right? I think a lot of people, they anthropomorphize this stuff. And when you’re thinking about kind of science fiction, you think that, okay, you’re going to get to something that’s like super smart, it’s going to want something or like be able to feel,” he added.
Zuckerberg seemed to be allying fears of AI taking over or looking to subjugate humans when it became sufficiently powerful. Zuckerberg said that while AI was intelligent, it didn’t have a will, which could’ve directed it to grow or expand its presence, and neither did it have consciousness, which could give it a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction from becoming more powerful. He seemed to imply that thus far, intelligence was thought to be tightly coupled with will and consciousness — humans, for instance, use their intelligence to do activities that make them happy, and have a will to achieve their goals. But AI was a different entity — it was pure intelligence — which wouldn’t feel the need or desire to concern itself with world domination. It remains to be seen how these predictions play out, but it is a persuasive argument that could help reassure some of the more alarmist sections of the tech world that are having sleepless nights over AI going rogue.