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I have to say that these advancements leave me unsure whether ML is much more advanced than I previously thought or human behavior is much less complex than I previously thought.


It's both, but I think the latter is the more notable part.

We like to pat ourselves on the back for behavior that computers can't do, but in a lot of ways those behaviors aren't really all that important. We pay attention to them because they're specific to us, but they're really just about humans interacting with each other rather than anything fundamental to the universe.

We're highly specialized for those things, and specialized by evolution which always takes a roundabout route to creating anything. So they're hard to reproduce precisely... but if you were creating an "intelligent species" from scratch you probably wouldn't have put them in there at all.

We still haven't really come close to understanding the weird, elliptical, Rube Goldberg mechanism by which brains produce consciousness. And that mechanism is neat for its ability to rapidly pick up certain categories of things -- albeit never logical, rigid categories of things. Anything logical or rigid can already be done by a computer a million times better.

Any time we carve out a sub-project it pretty quickly succumbs to a solution. Even off-the-wall stuff like "self driving cars" are really very good in 98% of cases after a couple of decades of concerted effort. We clutch our pearls about the 2% because we really hate it when people die... but that says as much about us as about the ML. If we were to replace ALL of the cars with AI, even with the 2022 top of the line, you'd probably get fewer net deaths.

So we still seem to be a long way from solving "human behavior". But it turns out that it may not actually be all that important, except as a bit of chauvinism defining ourselves as the most advanced thing in the universe.




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