Plato explains Artificial Intelligence (AI)

 


Who could have guessed that Plato, that Greek philosopher from from the 4th century BC, could have come up with a great explanation of our current Artificial Intelligence? His Allegory of the Cave is a great way to understand how AI works, and its built-in weaknesses.

Imagine, says Plato, a group of people chained to a wall in a cave. In front of them is a high wall, which is all they can view. Behind them is a rise where a fire is burning. Between the fire and the chained people is a walkway where individuals walk, holding up silhouettes of various things. The silhouettes create shadows on the high wall that the chained people can see. These silhouettes are the only way the chained people get information about the outside world. To them, that is the world, since that is all they know.

While Plato is using this allegory as a promo for philosophy, I think it’s an excellent explanation of AI. Consider the chained people as AI programs. The fire and silhouette holders are the AI creators, feeding their programs information, which would be the shadows on the wall. The AI programs only know about the world from what the creators show them as shadows on the wall. They do not even know that there is a world beyond these shadows. They know of nothing beyond what their creators show them. So their knowledge is not only severely deficient in quality, but also in quantity.

And yet, the AI creators are insisting that their programs will soon be smarter than humans. We should think of AI programs as smarter than us, and give them all the intellectual duties and work. But this is completely backwards to how we should look at AI, which is simply an over-hyped tool, not a replacement for human thought. “The promise of automation was to do the mundane so human creativity can flourish. Instead, human creativity is demeaned as mundane so Big Tech’s machines can flourish” [Thinking Like a Human, by David Weitzner, p. 114]. AI will never replace humans because of the built-in limitations it has. It has no senses. It only knows the information it is fed. It is biased by the construction of its creators. It thinks like a machine, not a human.

The Tech Bros want us to quickly give up our jobs, our water, our electricity, our land, and much else, to their vision of the future where they run everything. I don’t want that.


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