Does AI really think as we understand what thinking is?
As in human thinking. Using our cerebral frontal cortex.
At a basic level, an LLM is just predicting the next word in a sentence based on probabilities seen during training.
So you could argue that it doesn’t understand what it’s saying like humans do.
But how does a human know that they understand what they’re saying?
It’s just a feeling. An internal confirmation that what was said made sense.
How is that not probabilistic?
Maybe it’s just a biological equivalent of an LLM.
Then there’s a whole different matter of the “witness.”
The watcher behind a thought. The ghost in the machine. The soul.
We start to get into unknown, esoteric territory there. Which might be a topic for a different post altogether.
But as far as human thinking goes, I suspect we are pretty darn close to having exceeded that ability with AI.
That is a scary thought in many ways.
We are definitely in for one hell of a ride going forward.
And it may result in a mass recalibration of society and how we live.
Something we haven’t seen since the Industrial Revolution.