Apple published a paper last week in which it is shown that current AI models (especially large reasoning models) cannot yet think for themselves(https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf) and Sam Altman writes in his blog(https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity) how the AI world will change in the next few years and what this means for us humans.
And everyone goes crazy…. ?!
I think you have to look at it with a little distance and somewhat unemotionally…:
Even if AI were to remain at its current level, such systems would be “smarter” than humans in certain areas. As far as knowledge reproduction, memorization and navigating the digital jungle are concerned – AI can already do that better than us.
On the other hand, AI will never be able to do some things as well as we can. Feelings and emotions, taste, pain, touch – these are dimensions that will remain the preserve of humans for some time to come (I’m just imagining an AI that falls out of a tree, hits its knee and feels the pain. Um…).
All of this leads to a different background of experience in humans, to different learning effects and to different / more intensive knowledge connections than digital systems can achieve, which ultimately only “live” in one dimension (digital knowledge). This inevitably results in different forms of intelligence.
In the digital world, AI is already superior to humans. In other areas, AI does not yet exist at all. And then there’s the fact that sometimes even real people can be pretty stupid….
Intelligence is not an easily measurable quantity. And perhaps the human brain is just a dull parrot that links and reproduces information (from many different areas). Or perhaps we humans simply overestimate ourselves.
For example, I would be really interested to know how many people would be able to solve the “Towers of Hanoi” puzzle mentioned in the Apple paper. Here on LinkedIn certainly at least 80%. But when I walk through the city and randomly ask passers-by, probably significantly fewer – because intelligence is not only defined by solving puzzles.
Apple is not going to destroy the AI movement with its paper (that was not its claim) and Sam Altman is not going to make humans obsolete with his blog entry (that was not his claim either). So I don’t really understand the excitement that these two articles are causing.
But maybe I’m just not intelligent enough for that and should ask the AI for support….