Mike Israetel: evaluation

Transcript context

…And of course, I brought this up when I debated Mike Israeltel. And the biggest misconception in all of AI, what all of the folks in San Francisco believe in is this philosophical idea called functionalism. That we're walking up the mountain and when we get to the top of the mountain, we have all of these abstract capabilities like being able to reason, play chess. But that disregards that the path that you took walking up the mountain is very important and not only the path, the physical instantiation, the stuff that the mountain is made out of. So Mike's view is that if something produces intelligent outputs, why does the substrate matter? Silicon, neurons, it doesn't make any difference. It's all information processing. Needless to say, he pushed back hard. You can climb mountains, you can touch stuff, but you never truly embodied experience anything if you push on that philosophical button hard enough because you can always abstract out to like, these are just neural network pings from groups of neurons. And so, you don't truly deeply know anything in some kind of weird philosophical way because it's just neural network calculus all the way down. You know, you climb the mountain, that's cool. Helicopter can climb a mountain much better than you. Does not have the ability to reason and abstractly and plan and predict things at all. So it's possible that what you can do or how you can function isn't the whole story. Or maybe if that's wrong, we should just start using helicopters. So individual minds are limited. But what about collective minds? What about humanity as a whole? We've built this incredible thing over centuries. Right? Libraries, universities, Wikipedia, an expanding store of knowledge that no single person could ever hold. Doesn't that escape our individual limitations? So there's this dream of universal knowledge, accessible anywhere, perspective free.…

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