[FRIAM] GPT-3 and the chinese room

[Frank Wimberly]

Re:  Chinese Room

I mentioned the Chinese Room thought experiment to my erstwhile boss, a
bona fide philosopher.  His reaction, "Anything follows from a false
premise.". I think he meant that having a room full of Chinese scholars who
laboriously execute a complex algorithm they don't understand is
preposterous.  Maybe something like that reasoning caused you to react
disdainfully when you did.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 2:22 PM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just for any old cf:
> https://analyticsindiamag.com/open-ai-gpt-3-code-generator-app-building/
>
> Someone mentioned in a recent thread, here, the Chinese Room thought
> experiment, to which my reaction is always "Bah! That's nothing but a
> loaded question" ... like "have you stopped beating your child?" But the
> truth is, my answer to the Chinese Room is that it *is* intelligent. GPT-3
> is nothing but the Chinese Room. Similarly, all we are is deep memory
> machines trained up on huge datasets. At some point, I've made the argument
> that the demonstration of *understanding* can't be made through language.
> As fond as I am of repeating back someone's expression in one's own words
> to demonstrate you grokked their point, *ultimately* the only demonstration
> of understanding that I really accept is in the *doing* or the *making* of
> stuff.
>
> Now, there's some prestidigitation behind debuild.co. But at first blush,
> here is a machine that *understands* the website specification well enough
> to actually code the website. The AI skeptics will move the goalposts, of
> course, as they always do. E.g. they can say that programming a website to
> meet specs isn't a big deal, we've had declarative and domain-specific
> languages for awhile. And web pages and programming languages are all
> purely linguistic anyway. But it's a short trip from here to, say, a CNC
> machine, a 3D printer, a script for a light show, or even algorithmic
> composition of music.
>
> I'm reminded of people who are expert at some task, like playing baseball
> or whatever, but when asked *how* they do what they do, they're at a loss
> ... tacit but no reflective understanding ... like a cat not really
> recognizing itself in a mirror, where dolphins do.
>
> What's actually missing in the machines we berate as being mindless
> algorithms is not general intelligence or universal computation. It's
> general-purpose sensorimotor sytems ... universal manipulation ... hands
> with thumbs, tightly coupled feedback loops like our sense of touch,
> excruciatingly sensitive data fusion organelles like olfactory bulbs, etc.
> I think I can argue that's what gives us "understanding" ... not whatever
> internal computation we're capable of.
>
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
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