How real can artificial intelligence be?
What every thinking human needs to know. And a robot tells a moving story
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The Big Story:
The third global summit on Artificial Intelligence is over and all the talk is about embracing AI as the future rather than fearing it. Will we?
Many people already use generative AI tools to translate, transcribe and produce text, images and other material.
AI offers poorer countries the chance to leapfrog whole stages of development – particularly in medical diagnosis and education – just as landline telephones were superseded by mobiles in the early 2000s.
Linguistics professors as well as philosophers-turned-AI experts promise that “hyperbolic headlines” and “injudicious investments” cannot disguise the reality that AI tools “differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language” and therefore can never have our “true intelligence”.1
In this context, this week’s first book pick raises an essential issue:
“How much further there is to go before our machines can argue for their own humanity.”
This Week, Those Books:
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