Stephen Downes

"We keep asking," says Carlo Iacono, "does the machine think like us?" But, he says, the question is a trap. "It assumes that intelligence has a natural shape, and that shape happens to be ours. It assumes that anything which diverges from the human pattern is therefore not thinking at all, merely simulating, merely pattern matching, merely autocomplete with better marketing." There is something that is thinking that isn't any of this. "Whatever the machine does, it cannot be what we do, because we are special and it is not." But honestly, "This is not science. This is theology wearing a lab coat." And I agree. It's similar to what Ethan Mollick says here: there are different shapes of thinking. And as Iacono says, "The universe is under no obligation to make intelligence bipedal, social, emotional, or narratively satisfying. It only has to work. And work, it turns out, can take shapes we never imagined."