Philosophy

What does it actually mean to think and reason? I came across this definition of a ‘Reasoning AI model’ recently while reading the book “How to AI” by Christopher Mims. According to the book, a reasoning model is a type of AI/large language model that talks to itself in order to “reason” through a problem. While a technical definition of how an AI model ’thinks’ is more complicated, it still made me think - Do we also solve our problems by talking to ourselves? What’s the ideal process of reasoning for humans? Is it just talking to ourselves? Is it asking “Why?” to get to the root of a problem and then finding a solution? ...

This post is not about how and when AI (Artificial Intelligence) will take over and humans will be left with nothing to do in terms of work. I believe we are far away from that, and we are still not sure whether we will see that level of superintelligence in our lifetimes. What I want to focus on is this: given that we are working towards a world where AI could potentially do anything a human can (Artificial General Intelligence) and that intellectual tasks are slowly being outsourced to AI in phases; this is probably a good time to pause and think about how a world like that would look. ...