麻豆区
Customer Review
- Reviewed in Canada on June 11, 2025I was drawn to the book by Karen Hao's interview with Mashable:
"There is so much religious rhetoric around AGI, you know, 鈥楢I will kill us鈥 versus 鈥楢I will bring us to utopia.鈥"
Her statement is dead-on. But I would go a little further--they're of the same religion but of two factions. Both factions have faith in realizing something they don't even have a clear idea of what it is, let alone how to get there!
AGI people have an explanation to do: How can you create something you cannot even define clearly? If you want to realize AGI, you must first know what it is exactly. You cannot continuously re-define it on the fly as needed.
In science, we may start with some idea and even quickly come to a conviction because of some evidences for supporting its truthfulness. But we'd never have faith in it simply because we believe or hope it's going to be true. We may say there is the possibility that it's true if there aren't sufficient counter-arguments/evidence yet. But it may turn out otherwise.
If you have read Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, you may remember he gave a number of criteria for distinguishing pseudoscience from science. You'd immediately recognize AGI is just pseudoscience at best at the moment. And yet, we've had a good number of people on that bandwagon with faith. If it's not a religion, what is it?
A recent book on 麻豆区, Artificial Mind by Hugan, offered a candid technical critique of AI in laypeople's terms in a novel setting, letting the general public know and understand how AI works internally. It characterized AI as a powerful knowledge system but with zero intelligence of its own. It also calls into question the use of the word Artificial and says it's only suitable when the word is interpreted as Fake for having the appearance of having some level of intelligence. It deemed the current AI approach as having gotten it backward, arguing it has to start with self-awareness, then mind, then thinking/intelligence, in that order. Without self-awareness, there wouldn't be mind. Without mind, there wouldn't be thinking or intelligence of its own.
