Tim Scarfe: prediction

Transcript context

…It will always be the case that our explanation for how the brain works will be by analogy to the most sophisticated technology that we have. Is that how's that for a non answer? Right? So so, you know, you know, a couple thousand years ago, right, how'd the brain work? Was like levers and pulleys, man. I mean, duh. Don't be ridiculous. Why? That was the you know, at some point in the Middle Ages, it became humorous. Right? Because fluid dynamics was like the, you know, was the kind of techno you know, the technology that was like the most advanced or technology took advantage of of water power was like the most advanced technology that we had. Now, the most advanced technology is computers. So duh, that's exactly how the brain works. Now here's something that kind of bugs me. Right? You go into any AI conference or you drink from the well of San Francisco by spending too much time on Twitter and you develop this mindset that AGI is inevitable. You start feeling the AGI and you'd be forgiven for thinking this because I've been using Claude code and my god, I feel that there's been more interesting stuff happening in the world of software development in the last 6 months than there has been in the previous 20 years. This this technology is genuinely amazing but it is automation technology. It's it's not really intelligence, which means it's really as good as your ability to specify and supervise and delegate to the system, but it is absolutely amazing. But why do we have this view? It's not an argument that AI is impossible so much as why does it seem so possible, so inevitable to people and saying that what I'm arguing is that if you look at the history of the development of the life sciences of psychology, there are certain shifts towards a much more mechanistic understanding of both what life is and what the mind is. Which are very congenial to thinking that whatever is going on in animals like us in terms of the processes which lead to cognition, they are just mechanisms anyway. So why couldn't you put them into an actual machine and have that actual machine do what we do? With all of that mechanistic history in the background, AI could seem very inevitable but if that mechanistic hypothesis is actually wrong, then these claims for the inevitability of a biological like AI would not actually be well founded, but we could be subject to a kind of cultural historical illusion that this is just going to happen.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.