Following a link from a NYT editorial, I came upon a transcribed interview of Douglas Hofstadter on his fright about the current nature of AI and in particular of the impact of (surprise, surprise!) ChatGPT. When the French translation of Gödel, Escher, Bach came out in 1985, it became an immediate success, I read it, enjoyed it and recommended to my inner circles. To the point of my superior in the Navy (during the year I was drafted in the French Navy) saw the cover (for I was also reading it in the Navy office!), browsed through it and asked me to… reproduce the sculpture (a 3D ambigram) for the logo of his own company (for he moonlighted several days a week at an hologram company he had created). Which proved rather straightforward (but I ignore if the result was ever exploited). While I am now much less reserved about the book, which I feel is quite pretentious and self-congratulary, without delivering a particularly deep message, I can related to my earlier self excitement when faced with a scientific book involving many themes of interest for me, pleasant and easy to read, if sometimes mired in heavily making a point. This is obviously a personal view and others, like the science vulgariser Marcus du Sautoy launched a celebration for the 40 years of the book. (Coincidence: I had a chat & a beer with a former high school teacher of his’ in Normandy a week before writing this post.)
“it almost feels that way, as if we, all we humans, unbeknownst to us, are soon going to be eclipsed, and rightly so, because we’re so imperfect and so fallible.”
“it feels as if the entire human race is going to be eclipsed and left in the dust soon”
The tone of the interview is hilariously super catastrophic, foreseeing the replacement of humans by their “successors” within a few years, nothing less. There is no deep argument in the discussion, only that AIs are now playing chess and Go better than humans, can provide apparently reasonable answers to many questions, at a speed surpassing human faculties, including poetry or coding. Which proves such a reducing modelling of what constitutes a human being and the meaning of consciousness. (The last line of the interview “YouTube transcript cleaned up by GPT-4 & checked against audio” is hilarious, whether it is intended to be so or not.)
