Jamie Thingelstad

The new metal Loon sculpture at Allianz Field is impressive in person. Cool addition to the stadium.

The pizza at Boludo is so incredible. Delicious and unique!

I attended a public lecture hosted by Anselm House on Are We Merely Machines? tonight featuring Rosalind W. Picard of the MIT Media Lab. It was an interesting talk covering materialism, scientism, and ontology. Picard’s view is that we are not, and that we should not, attempt to blur the lines between machine and human, and that humans are always ontologically the maker.

I’m challenged to find the difference so stark.

One argument often asserted is that machines using artificial intelligence only know what they know because they have learned it from what people have done. However isn’t that equally true for people? Nobody is born a poet, they learn from poets. You are not born a Chess Grandmaster, you learn from chess players. AI and people do the same thing. The incremental small improvements in knowledge are mostly unmeasurable.

Another assertion is that LLMs are just statistical models of language and they put words together branching on simple math. How can we assert that people don’t do the same thing? The structure of language itself limits the structure, and isn’t our brain doing something somewhat similar to the LLM?

Which isn’t to say that I believe an AI is a person. I do not. I think it is likely more accurate to say I lack the philosophical depth to explore the points in detail.