Of God and Machines

The details of how this could be are utterly opaque. NLP programs operate based on what technologists call parameters : pieces of information that are derived from enormous data sets of written and spoken speech, and then processed by supercomputers that are worth more than most companies. GPT-3 uses 175 billion parameters. Its interpretive power is far beyond human understanding, far beyond what our little animal brains can comprehend. Machine learning has capacities that are real, but which transcend human understanding: the definition of magic.

This unfathomability poses a spiritual conundrum. But it also poses a philosophical and legal one. In an attempt to regulate AI, the European Union has proposed transparency requirements for all machine-learning algorithms. Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, noted that such requirements would effectively end the development of the technology. The EU s plan requires that the system would be able to explain itself. But machine-learning systems cannot fully explain how they make their decisions, he said at a 2021 summit. You use this technology to think through what you can t; that s the whole point. Inscrutability is an industrial by-product of the process.

via www.msn.com