An epic AI Debate—and why everyone should be at least a little bit worried about AI going into 2023
We recorded 7 claims from this post. 2 were checked against evidence. 5 can’t be checked. Read the post at its source.
Claims from this post (7)
In the order they appear in the post. Each quotation is the speaker’s words in this post. A label such as “Supported” or “Can’t be checked” is the claim’s current assessment; its page has the evidence and the reasons.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“I, Gary Marcus, worried about whether contemporary approaches to AI would ever give solutions to four key aspects of thought that we ought to expect from any intelligent machine: reasoning, abstraction, compositionality, and factuality.”
What we tested: Contemporary approaches to AI may never solve reasoning, abstraction, compositionality, and factuality, which any intelligent machine should have.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
“(Spoiler alert: they’re not, at least not yet.)”
What we tested: Current approaches to getting machines to reason about causality are not adequate, at least not yet.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“George, like Chomsky and myself, called for a greater emphasis on the understanding of human intelligence.”
What we tested: AI research should place greater emphasis on understanding human intelligence.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“David Ferrucci, CEO of Elemental Cognition, and director of IBM’s successful Watson Jeopardy effort, worried that current systems were “ultimately unsatisfied”, and like me called for hybrid approaches that combine neural networks with reasoning and structured representations.”
What we tested: AI should pursue hybrid approaches combining neural networks with reasoning and structured representations.
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“Kai-Fu Lee, often far more optimistic than I am, worried about whether recent advances in AI-generated content were a net positive for society, or whether they might lead to an avalanche of misinformation [something I too am deeply worried about] and target advertising that might be detrimental.”
What we tested: Recent advances in AI-generated content may lead to an avalanche of misinformation.
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“That’s a huge commitment, 3.5 hours, but one thing that I think all of our speakers could agree on is that artificial intelligence, in whatever form it currently is, is about to have a huge impact on society.”
What we tested: AI, even in its current form, is about to have a huge impact on society.
What happened: The representative survey reports generative-AI adoption among 39.4% of US adults aged 18–64, with 28.1% of employed respondents reporting work use. This establishes mass uptake within approximately twenty months of the post; the measure does not imply that all users used AI daily. (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin, and David Deming, )
Assessment: Can’t be checkedSaid
“If you want to know what a large cross section of the field’s leaders are thinking, right now, there’s no better place to start, a time capsule of 2022 as we enter into the remaining wild AI years of the 2020s.”
What we tested: The remaining years of the 2020s will be wild for AI.