The Bitter Lesson of Mental Kudzu
My public library has that service to access periodicals online, so I opened the MIT Technonogy Review. All very intersting, capped with an article about pigeon thinking and AI: Planet-Sized Pigeon Brains, by Ben Crair. That got me thinking. After a little back and forth with Chat-GPT, yes, ironically, we had an outline and soon I had an essay. We imagined raptors. What we got were pigeons. For decades, the popular imagination of artificial intelligence leaned toward cleverness. We worried about cunning machines outsmarting us. Imagine chess-playing raptors, Go-playing predators, silicon minds with the capacity to stalk and trap us. Jurassic Park set the template: we feared the velociraptors, the clever girl who opens the door. But Rich Sutton’s “bitter lesson” tells us the real story. Progress in AI hasn’t come from mimicking human thought. It hasn’t come from modeling the neocortex, or building digital philosophers. It’s come from something far humbler: associative learning at ma...