[Rodney Marsh]

This is a VERY important issue.

Now <b data-testid=”headline” style=”background-color: var(–bb-content-background-color); font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; color: var(–bb-body-text-color);”>‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead

For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-engineer-quits-hinton.html

I have not yet read all the responses below but when I saw this topic I was immediately interested since I had displayed my ignorance on AI and LLMs in my “Schools for the Education of the Heart”. Here are my preliminary comments emphasising the dangers of LLMs since they have no life and can have no life because they are purely data based and cannot participate in the present moment through a living body. It seems to me that Flint is taking over the information world and that has to be dangerous since beauty, goodness and truth, without a RH, cannot be a moderating presence. Without “He who holds up the sky” to rescue us we will soon be running around shouting “The sky is falling!” Here is what I wrote:

Meditation Practices to Teach Open Attention

Right hemisphere open attention (OA), freed from the distractions of ‘thinking’, is the foundation of the human discovery of new knowledge. The new knowledge is what is needed to rescue ourselves and nature from the disasters we see coming. This urgently needed ‘new knowledge’ will come from practices which facilitate the open attention of meditation and not AI. Only open attention, not AI, can provide the keys to humans having a future because AI attention is exclusively data based. AI language programs are exclusively a left hemisphere perspective that attends to the past and cannot attend to the present moment. AI, both machine learning and language models, using an immense superhuman data bank are uncannily predictive on the basis of past learnings and so can help create great new tools to live with reality. But only creative human attention to the ‘now’ can provide the knowledge needed to live into a secure future for a rapidly changed and changing world. Past human insight and wisdom, harvested by AI, will be necessary to build the world of the future, but a secure future cannot be built without the creative leadership of the open attention of the right hemisphere to the present moment. As Jesus said, a true teacher “brings out new and old treasures from the storeroom.” Most importantly, the living practices of training the attention and paying attention, which are embodied in the world’s Wisdom meditation practices, are always ‘in the moment’ and hold the keys to humanity living in harmony with what is. We cannot live into the future without building on the past, but neither can we walk backwards into the future using old methods to solve new problems.

(The footnote was

”…we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge.” Opinion | Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT – The New York Times (nytimes.com) It seems to me that a purely left hemisphere machine learning system can only have a ’second hand’ right hemisphere perspective so, whilst it can be immensely useful, there are no limits to the damage it can do. In life, only the right hemisphere can provide limits to the left hemisphere‘s capacity for banal evil. For the opposite opinion see scottaaronson.blog ”The False Promises of Chomskyism” and an interesting discussion particularly Chatbot’s own opinion (comment#16) that it possesses a ”unique kind of intelligence”.)