Artificial Intelligence (AI) Doesn’t Ask Questions
If ChatGPT — or something similar — gives perfect answers, what about asking questions?
Feeling hype is human and feeling fear, too. That’s why humans are less efficient than machines. Hype and fear obfuscate the perception of happenings and the ability to stay rational.
The hype around the successes of AI in providing answers with natural language is made up of wonder. Ultimately, ChatGPT — and anything similar — passed the Turing test! That has been a dream for centuries, and now it’s a reality!
The fear is due to the upcoming replacement of many human jobs by AI, which is efficient, never tired, and almost always reliable. Horse breeders felt similar feelings when cars showed that they would soon replace horses as a means of transport.
Yet, there’s a crucial detail that is missing. Horses can decide where to go, but cars can’t. Likewise, humans can ask questions, but AI can’t. That happens with automation: we may lose meaning in return for efficiency.
What’s a question?
A question expresses a need.
An AI is like a vast database of question-answer couples. That’s the result of the AI training. When you ask the AI a question, it searches for the most similar question it contains and returns the related answer.
The magic happens when the AI answers in a natural language like a human.
Sure. But.
Does AI have any needs? The crucial point is whether the category “need” applies to a search engine that have no personal experiences or feeling, like ChatGPT says:
What’s a need?
A need is the expression of a will against the environment.
You need to eat to get the energy to move around because your environment requires you to move to survive.
You need to think about what to do to survive and succeed because your success consists of transforming the environment accordingly to your will.
Whether an AI can ask questions becomes whether an AI has any need.
I don’t have the answer. So, I asked ChatGPT:
Conclusions
Horses hadn’t disappeared when cars invaded the world; they have become a luxury.
Sure, cars changed humans’ capabilities to travel. In the same way, AI will change humans’ abilities to search for information in the vastest archive ever existing: the Internet. That’s huge.
Yet, humans remain in charge of deciding the destination when traveling and questions when searching for information.
That happens with automation: we may lose meaning in return for efficiency.
In other words, we remain in charge of the meaning of the search, which the most powerful search engine cannot provide.
If we try to delegate the meaning, we lose.
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