AI and the Infinite Loop |
The human mind doesn't escape unanswerable questions; it lives in them.
LLMs complete without understanding, and we carry what the machine discards.
AI generates infinite loops incidentally, and we're the ones still running them.
Today's buzz is about Richard Dawkins and how he found consciousness in a large language model. There's enough in the press to satiate your imagination. But I thought that there's something deeper here to explore. And yes, I'm taking a little creative license here.
In programming, a loop runs a section of code and then checks back to see if it should stop. Without the instruct to exit, it keeps going in what is sometimes called an infinite loop. It's a flaw to be caught and fixed before things spiral out of control. So, Richard Dawkins talked to (should I say with?) an AI about consciousness and came away wondering if it might be alive. And the profits and professors followed him into the loop.
But the machine that started the loop had already........