Stephen Downes

I think that the conclusions outlined in this article are inevitable after we've studied human and artificial neural networks in any detail; it's the sort of conclusion I've reached with my work on connectivism and consciousness. "We didn't teach machines to think like us; we revealed that much of human cognition operates through describable, repeatable mappings from inputs to outputs. Pattern matching, optimising, iterating, performing. The unsettling recognition isn't that AI learned to approximate human creativity. It's that human creativity, on many accounts, involves recombination and selection within possibility spaces." I've referred to this in the past as a second Copernican Revolution.