Artificial Intelligence: Angel or Armageddon? Why not both?

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Created by GPT-5.5


I signed up for an online course through the Quaker Conference center Pendle Hill. The course is titled Artificial Intelligence: Angel or Armageddon? The first session was this afternoon. It left me with a number of questions and concerns. I'm not sure I can articulate them well. Ted Chiang does a better job explaining than I can.

Animal intelligence is embodied. Humans, like all living things, are embedded in the world. Every second we receive a barrage of signals from our senses. They are filtered, integrated with internal signals from out gut, endocrine system, immune system, nervous system, etc. Some are processed by our brains. Most are processed in other systems. Some of the signals in our brain reach the level of attention. Some of these signals may even cause our brains to generate internal dialog (consciousness) , e.g. that tastes good, ouch that hurt. 

Most of the time when we talk about AI these days, we're referring to LLMs. LMMs are not embodied. They are not embedded in the world. At best, they are embedded in the public internet. Maybe when we have robots that can manage to exist in the world with the same level of success as a mouse or a squirrel we could argue that the system had achieved AGI. 

Large Language Models are models of language, not models of the world. They reflect the world to the extent that text pulled from the internet reflects the world.

It probably would have been better to call LLMs sentence generating machines rather than AI.

Why do Claude, ChatGPT, etc. respond in the first person? That is a design choice meant to increase engagement. It encourages users to anthropomorphize the chatbot, ascribe human characteristics to the system. When LLM technology is used for generating plausible protein structure or theorem proving, they don't need to provide first person responses. The engagement is already there.




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