AI has no intent and no motivation
This article argues that current AI models lack intent and motivation, distinguishing them from biological entities driven by survival needs. It suggests that fears of an AI apocalypse are often overstated by business leaders compared to the views of technical experts.
Why it matters
The debate over AI safety and the nature of machine intelligence is central to current technological and ethical discourse.
We seem to be worried a lot about the threat from AI going rogue, and there are lots of examples of it doing just that. However, they are all misrepresentations, as AI has no intent and no motivation.
If you believe that the current crop of AI is just a stochastic parrot, then there is nothing more to say - move on.
If you have used any of the current AI offerings, you have to conclude that, while the mechanism of training leads one to believe that these LLMs are just sophisticated auto-completes, they do seem to be so much more.
As I have argued many times, the training corpus, i.e., language, codifies enough about the structure of the world for LLMs to go well beyond what you might expect from a stochastic parrot. They are not intelligent, but they give a good impression of being so.
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