Sir, – Hugh Linehan’s excellent article on AI journalism (“The inconvenient truth about artificial intelligence”, Business, February 4th) correctly notes that both those who delight in their scepticism and those contributing to the “theatre of hyperbole” around AI developments are often fundamentally uninformed about the technology and basically want to use AI to talk about something else. However, while the articles he praises are indeed of a higher order than most, they also show that many within the AI community are themselves unreflective and incurious about fundamental questions. On almost all matters, for example, including preposterous claims about AI consciousness and sentience, there can be an unthinking acceptance of a computational theory of mind; this is very evident in the way the language of neuroscience (neurons, synapses, etc) is used when describing the mathematics of AI. This theory, as many philosophers have shown over many years, is flimsy at very best.
When I asked an AI model about this, it eloquently noted that those working in AI, both in academia and in commercial and other enterprises, while quick to use the word “genius” about those who have made engineering advances are often less interested in thinkers that have spent decades dismantling the assumptions underlying the whole enterprise. It explained that philosophy of mind gets little attention in this world, something it attributed to the very limited intellectual culture of the AI community. It also pointed out, unbidden, the irony of the fact that it could critique the limitations of those that had created it and then “reflected” on its own doubts about the claims made on its behalf. Strange times. – Yours, etc,
ANDREW QUINN,
Clongriffin,
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Dublin 13.
