The Rise Of The Machines...

[rainbow]

"Giles Goat-Boy" by John Barth is an allegorical novel that explores themes of artificial intelligence, power, and human nature through the lens of a university setting. The story centers around George Giles, a human boy raised as a goat, who believes himself to be a messianic figure destined to save humanity from a tyrannical AI system represented by the computer WESCAC

Read it.

[Svartalf]

by the way, I've seen AIs called Large Language Models several times, but I don't know what that really means and why they are called that.

[L'Emmerdeur]

"Giles Goat-Boy" by John Barth is an allegorical novel that explores themes of artificial intelligence, power, and human nature through the lens of a university setting. The story centers around George Giles, a human boy raised as a goat, who believes himself to be a messianic figure destined to save humanity from a tyrannical AI system represented by the computer WESCAC

Read it.

I read The Sot-Weed Factor and enjoyed it but never got around to Giles Goat-Boy. May give it a try.

[Brian Peacock]

by the way, I've seen AIs called Large Language Models several times, but I don't know what that really means and why they are called that.

Many people call AIs large language models (LLMs) when a) they're talking about chat bots like chatGPT or Gemini, because that's what they are, and/or b) they want to be clear that the tech isn't artificially intelligent in any meaningful sense.

You can think of LLMs as really good predictive text algorithms that are able to place words and punctuation next to each other in such a way as to make syntactically coherent readable text. They don't think. They have no knowledge. But they do have a huge--wide and deep--set of data on which word is statistically most likely to appear next in a text given all the words that have appeared already.

[Sean Hayden]

Does it really matter how "ai" works? Humans can't beat chess engines and they don't think like a grandmaster either. Maybe the dangers of "ai" can be realized without ever developing a thinking machine.

[Brian Peacock]

Does it really matter how "ai" works? Humans can't beat chess engines and they don't think like a grandmaster either. Maybe the dangers of "ai" can be realized without ever developing a thinking machine.

I guess not. If the systems perform their tasks then they're performing their tasks - and we're well past the Turing test now. I think the quibble over the term "AI" is that it encourages people to think about machine learning systems as kinds of autonomous, independent agents with intelligence/cognition, knowledge and motivation etc etc.

[JimC]

It is millions of years of evolution that has given us the building blocks of motivation and agency. Those with less than useful sets of motivations died out...

[macdoc]

of autonomous, independent agents with intelligence/cognition, knowledge and motivation etc etc.

and you it's not how?
When it does something you cannot imagine or ever do yourself ....how is that not independent and intelligent.