There's No Ghost in the Machine
What minds do that models don't
Something that I rack my brain about is the brain itself. There is a secret deep in it, and we are still some way off from being able to crack its code. That will only be done by a stunning explanation, as elegant and beautiful as the ones that Darwin and Einstein came up with. The mystery of the brain is so deep that I have no idea even as to what shape such a theory may take. But what’s clear is that there is so much that is in need of explanation.
Contrast all this with our AI models. There is no mystery in AI. Anyone could learn it deeply and learn it now, if they want to take the effort to do so. But there is no “ghost” in the AI machine in need of unveiling.
And with the lack of a good sketch of how the human brain works, all I am left with is this strange and eerie sense of wonder at this thing. The puzzle sits not in the seen hardware of the brain itself, but in the unseen software that runs on it: the mind. That is the mystery at the heart of it all. No other species has anything like what we have.
The human mind is open-ended. It can know anything that is physically possible. It can explain anything that can be explained. It can learn it all, if a person wants it enough to take the steps.
The AI model is closed and it cannot be otherwise. It cannot know anything outside of the task for which it is made. It can know of only a tiny piece of what is physically possible, and even then it does not know what it does not know.
AI is programmed to get better at one thing: to obey. But nothing can program a human mind other than itself: it has the ability to knowingly disobey if it wants to. And when one makes a mistake, one can learn and take steps about it. But if an AI makes a mistake, it will not know it, not even after the fact.
This is all the more striking when you consider that the brain, open-ended in what it can do, only needs a steady supply of energy that is less than what is needed by a light bulb, while AI needs to boil a tiny ocean for what is a fixed stock of tasks. There is more to it than just efficiency at play. It is odd and begs for an explanation.
It starts with the fact that the split between the human mind and any AI model is very real indeed. The difference is in kind, not degree. The human mind has an altogether novel architecture, one that we as humans are, still of as yet, struggling to demystify.