Stephen Downes

This article begins with the question, "How many Reddit posts does it take to learn to read?" The answer "all of them" is intended to show the difference between human learning and AI learning. The intent is to show '200 lines of Python code does not understand anything'. It's a bizarre supposition, to be sure. But in response I invite the reader to consider the same questions asked about humans. Do the chemicals and interactions in a human neuron 'understand' anything? If given only Reddit posts, would it not take a lot of posts to learn how to read? That's the problem with these human-AI comparisons: we assume these almost-magical human abilities that in reality stem from (a) a wider range of experience from all our senses, and (b) a lot of interconnected neurons. The proposal that human understanding is fundamentally different does not follow from arguments like this. Yet people keep making them.