1970s AI bros (incl McCarthy) whining about the inventor of ELIZA telling them to gfy
1970s AI bros (incl McCarthy) whining about the inventor of ELIZA telling them to gfy
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From McCarthy's reply:
My current answer to the question of when machines will reach human-level intelligence is that a precise calculation shows that we are between 1.7 and 3.1 Einsteins and .3 Manhattan Projects away from the goal.
omg this statement sounds 100% like something that could be posted today by Sam Altman on X. It's hititing exactly the sweet spot between appearing precise but also super vague, like Altman's "a few thousand days".
That sentence is somewhere between exactly 420.69 and 1,337.00 millialtmans of cringe.
That paragraph begins,
Like his predecessor critics of artificial intelligence, Taube, Dreyfus and Lighthill, Weizenbaum is impatient, implying that if the problem hasn't been solved in twenty years, it is lime to give up.
Weizenbaum replies,
I do not say and I do not believe that "if the problem hasn't been solved in twenty years, we should give up". I say (p. 198) " . . . it would be wrong . . . to make impossibility arguments about what computers can do entirely on the grounds of our present ignorance". That is quite the opposite of what McCarthy charges me with saying.
It's a snidely jokey response to an argument that Weizenbaum didn't make!
And even if Joseph Weizenbaum did actually say, verbatim: “if the problem hasn’t been solved in twenty years, it is time to give up”, that's not the same as asking for the precise time when “machines will reach human-level intelligence”.
It's sarcasm. The question asks for unwarranted precision and the response is a joke.
Imagining a guy who asks me a dumb question so I can let everyone know how I'd mock them with a joke answer.
“Pray tell mr Babbage..”
Spot on, yeah. Although as pointed out just above, this wasn't actually Weizenbaum's position. But in an era of letters to the editor, perhaps using a little rhetorical trickery to preempt a two-month-long back and forth might be excusable. It's a strawman nonetheless; but this letter is a screed.
I suspect he got asked it a lot. There was a lot of interesting work going on back then but people basically didn't have any notion that there was a path from there to any kind of AGI. (In that respect they might've been somewhat more clued up than Altman.)
I think it's a natural thing to preemptively defend against the obvious counterpoint when you're railing against the thesis that current AI work isn't going to deliver on the "I".
Having said that, that this is the kind of thing Altman might say unironically speaks volumes. He really does have a trillion-dollar monorail to sell.
Ah, thanks, well my sarcasm detector isn't that good.