Chomsky’s Opinion Piece in the NYT on AI
The New York Times published an opinion piece on March 8, 2024, by Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull called “The False Promise of ChatGPT”. Dr. Chomsky and Dr. Roberts are Professors of Linguistics and Dr. Watumull is a director of AI at a technology company.
Both Chomsky and Roberts are professors of linguistics at prestigious universities. As linguists, their approach to AI begins with citing elements of human intelligence and drawing comparisons of what AI systems actually do. The human brain is not just a computational engine marching bits around inside silicon chips but made of fatty neurons. Our brains are able to ” … balance creativity with constraint”. I think this is called “considered judgement”.
Naturally the piece has spurred numerous rebuttals including one by ChatGPT. Having used ChatGPT, I can confirm that it left me in a state a wonderment. It is easy to be impressed by its speed and seemingly cogent response. AI and machine learning are part of a current and expanding technology bubble being inflated up by computer code squads in both academics and business. It is both a fascinating basket of problems to be solved and a lucrative startup space for an emerging industry.
Some text from the article-
“OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought. These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence — that long-prophesied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains not only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory size but also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight, artistic creativity and every other distinctively human faculty.”
“In short, ChatGPT and its brethren are constitutionally unable to balance creativity with constraint. They either overgenerate (producing both truths and falsehoods, endorsing ethical and unethical decisions alike) or undergenerate (exhibiting noncommitment to any decisions and indifference to consequences). Given the amorality, faux science and linguistic incompetence of these systems, we can only laugh or cry at their popularity.”
“The crux of machine learning is description and prediction; it does not posit any causal mechanisms or physical laws. Of course, any human-style explanation is not necessarily correct; we are fallible. But this is part of what it means to think: To be right, it must be possible to be wrong. Intelligence consists not only of creative conjectures but also of creative criticism. Human-style thought is based on possible explanations and error correction, a process that gradually limits what possibilities can be rationally considered. (As Sherlock Holmes said to Dr. Watson, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”)” [Emphasis mine]
My own opinion of AI is only just a series of half-formed, half-assed sputtering sentence fragments that are in the “It’ll never fly, Orville” stage. Nobody wants to hear that.
If you look back on the history of science and technology, many patterns arise. The discovery or invention of the wheel and the lever, iron and copper smelting, the steam engine, the Voltaic pile, electromagnetism, coal tar distillates, the first sulfa antibiotic Prontosil, the discovery of nuclear fission, and many, many more discoveries and developments of core technologies. What these events have in common is that each sit at the beginning of a long and fruitful chain of succeeding developments along with business opportunities and great wealth. The wealth came from having something new and useful to sell. Most of these development chains involved the reduction of labor hours in production to produce a unit of product. With competition came the impetus to reduce costs to maintain sales.
An earlier technology bubble was the personal computer (PC). The PC’s very existence led to software development leading to an avalanche of improvement in every aspect of the PC. This led to the use of spreadsheets, word processors, email and databases which phased-out the need for a large secretarial pool. These improvements gave way to do-it-yourself correspondence and spreadsheet data analysis, as well as a multitude of data entry and typesetting chores for everyone. This had the effect of keeping the headcount down at the organization and perhaps raising margins.
The question now is, what kind of havoc in the labor market will be wreaked by AI? Will AI be exploited to traffic in political influence? It already has. AI amounts to a foam of adjacent expanding bubbles trying to push into every aspect of our lives, each bubble a cure looking for a disease. But virtually every new technology seeks the same. The difference with AI is that it in itself is a smooth-talking devil capable of offering either great good or an entry into the dark arts.