Stephen Downes

I've seen this point made a few times, and made it myself a couple of times, but it bears repeating: the rise of AI results in what might be called a new Copernican revolution, in which humanity's place at the centre of the world is lost. "The human-machine distinction provided modern humans with a scaffold for how to understand themselves and the world around them. The philosophical significance of AIs — of built, technical systems that are intelligent — is that they break this scaffold." Arguably, to my mind, the mechanism underlying intelligence is simple pattern recognition. If so, we're no different in principle than other pattern recognizers. "Does this mean that human brains and AI are the same thing? Of course not. Are birds, planes and drones all the same thing? No, but they all make use of the general laws of aerodynamics. And the same may be true for brains."