Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is philosophize this. Thank you to everyone who supports the show on patreon patreon.com slash philosophize this. Thanks to everyone also who supports the show doing other things, telling a friend, leaving a review so people can find out about the podcast. Thanks for everything.

I hope you love the show today.

So no doubt since November of 2022 with the launch of chat GPT and the job the media has done to make everybody and their mom aware of large language models and developments in the field of AI.

No doubt many of you have heard the news and no doubt most of you have tried out something like chat GPT and had a conversation with it. And maybe after having that conversation, you felt pretty impressed like wow. This thing seems like a real person. It's given me some pretty well-formed coherent responses to all the stuff I'm asking it.

I mean, this is nothing like that paper clip that used to harass me on Windows XP service pack to this things coming from my family. Maybe you've seen those conversations people have had with an AI where it's

professing its love for the person that's asking a question. So leave your family. They don't love you like I do. That stuff actually happened. Maybe you've heard about people recently talking about the possibility of us being on the verge of AGI or artificial general intelligence, the long prophesied stage of development in the field of AI, where things are apparently going to go from what people call weak AI.

These are things like calculators watches things that can simulate some single aspect of human intelligence and strong AI, a different level of AI that has the ability to understand learn and adapt. This is AI that can implement knowledge on a level that matches or exceeds that of a human being. That's what AGI is.

And maybe you've heard about all the doomsday scenarios as to what's going to go down if something like that were to ever be invented.

But is that really something we got to be worried about right now? Are we really on the verge of a technological singularity where artificial intelligence becomes an invasive species that we've created?

Are we currently in a technological arms race to create something that's thousands of times more intelligent than we can ever hope to be with goals of a scope we can't possibly begin to imagine is chat GPT just the first iteration of an amoeba that will eventually evolve into all that if just given enough time.

To answer that question, the first place we got to start is with a far less ambitious question, and that's not whether chat GPT is on the verge of breaking out of its black box and taken over the world, but whether or not machines like chat GPT are intelligent in the same way that a human being is intelligent.

Are these machines really doing the same stuff we are doing when we solve problems? And on a more fundamental level than that, maybe as you've had a conversation with one of these things being the kind of person that listens to a show like this.

Maybe you've asked the very philosophical question, hey, forget about understanding or intelligence for a second, I wonder as I'm talking to chat GPT if this machine is thinking in the same way that I'm thinking, like what's going on when there's those three dots blinking and it's loading when it's processing and determining what to say next, is that the computer thinking is thinking even something that's rigidly definable by the way that I'm thinking with my brain or can thinking be defined in many different ways.

If we want to answer these questions, and if we don't want to spend the rest of our lives falsely equating our intelligence with artificial intelligence, then the first step philosophers realized long ago was going to be to pay very close attention to exactly what it is that computers are doing.

Bit of historical context here, the modern version of this conversation around whether machines can think or are intelligent essentially began with the work of a guy named Alan Turing.

Turing was an absolute genius level mathematician and back in his time back in the early 1900s, he was fascinated by all the stuff going on in the philosophy of mind and mechanical engineering.

He was also a total visionary. I mean, it's clear in many ways he foresaw the age of digital computing decades before it even happened.

And being in that place of awareness, seeing the writing on the wall back then, he came up with what he thought was an inevitable question that people were going to have to eventually take seriously if things kept going in this direction.

The question was, how would we know if machines were intelligent, if they were in fact intelligent? It's actually a pretty difficult question to answer the more you think about it.

I mean, at what point does something go from weak AI, something like your alarm clock, to something that can have an understanding of things, something that's intelligent, something that has a mind.

How do you even begin to answer those questions? Well, if we want to figure out an answer, we got to start somewhere.

An Alan Turing came up with an idea for a way to test for machine intelligence. You've probably heard of it. It's called the Turing test. It's famous at this point.

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