https://pixabay.com/photos/hand-man-book-old-person-people-1599946/
The Chinese Room
The Chinese Room is one of the best known and oldest intellectual exercises in the philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, dating back to 1980, when John Searle postulated it.
John describes the following situation: Imagine that a man who does not speak or write Chinese is locked in a room. In that room, on a table within his reach, is a book containing complete translation notes in “If-Then” format.
If the man is faced with an incomprehensible Chinese symbol, the book will have written down which symbol the man can assign, in order to respond to the symbol he has before him.
Now, imagine that someone posts a letter in that same room that contains only Chinese symbols and nothing else.
The man, with the book at his disposal, follows the instructions written in it and writes a document in response to the initial document that was given to him.
The letter written by the man is in perfectly understandable and perfectly correct Chinese.
The question that John Searle then asks is: “Does the person in the room understand Chinese, or is he just mimicking?”
The even more philosophical and profound question that arises is: “What is the difference between mimicking and understanding?”
Of course, John Searle was referring to the computers that existed at that time. Most of them worked on “If-Then” algorithms.
But today, Artificial Intelligence is slightly different.
Today, Large Language Models are constantly changing and evolving.
They are continuously growing and adapting. They are developed using a model very similar to the neural networks found in any living being with an organized Central Nervous System.
But does this make a difference to the point of view and question raised by John Searle?
Can a computer even perceive or understand a situation, a question, an emotion, or will it forever be trapped and confined to an algorithmic box from which it cannot escape?
And are humans really that different in their essence?
What do you think about this hypothetical exercise raised in 1980?
Source for this post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Free image from Pixabay.com
Congratulations @xrayman! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain And have been rewarded with New badge(s)
Your next payout target is 13000 HP.
The unit is Hive Power equivalent because post and comment rewards can be split into HP and HBD
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPCheck out our last posts: