Alien Intelligences

LLMs such as ChatGPT are alien intelligences. They have the language skills of a 33-year old college graduate and the world knowledge of a 3-year old infant.

In humans, our various basic skills are rarely as separable as they currently are in our machines. TBH, at the current state of the art, a computer learning language is major victory achieved at enormous cost, taxing the limits of our global computing capabilities. We don't have the resources to let our machines learn math and physics. Yet. Future generations of machines will. And better algorithms, like mine, will help.

But we already have lots of experience with alien intelligences.

We seem to be getting along fine with dogs, cats, and parrots. And mentally handicapped people. And infants. And mentally impaired elderly. And significantly less or more educated people than ourselves. And (asking for a friend) many people are on the autism spectrum, which may also require "adjustments to interaction protocols".

So it is not a problem. We adopt to other kinds of intelligences all the time.

Daniel Dennett in "The Intentional Stance" explains that this ALREADY extends to machines. His definition is elegantly backwards from conventional thinking about how to relate to machines:

If it makes YOUR interaction with a device EASIER, then by all means, treat that device as if it has intentions.

"My car is mad at me and won't start. I need to let him cool down a bit." If you have a name for your car, you are already doing this.

"That damn Roomba is scared of my bedroom"

This position is what he calls "Adopting an Intentional Stance".

There are other such stances we can adopt. The two biggest and most famous stances are "The Reductionist Stance" where we do things scientifically, and "The Holistic Stance" where we only need Understanding of the problem to do "simpler" things without science, planning or forethought. We "just do it", to coin a phrase. This is how we do nearly everything. Pre-scientifically.

As it happens, vision and language Understanding are two of those "simpler" things. These can not be done Scientifically. We learn these as infants, before taking any Science classes.

And Machine Learning is simply the recent discovery of how to make machines do such "simple" things pre-scientifically.

By gathering correlations and jumping to conclusions on scant evidence.