We would if the car was to race against human runners. It's just word play. Cars are not used like runners, so we use different words. They definitely are better runners.
Now that technology is touching our core business we get scared, but this has been going on for a long, long time. When it was our legs, we brush it off. But when it touches our ability to think we squirm.
Cars go faster than humans can by themselves, under some specific conditions.
Cars go slower than humans, or rather cannot go at all, under other specific conditions. Two weeks ago my wife ran 30 miles on trails in southern Texas. A car could not have traversed any of the distance she travelled on, because a car cannot run.
Cars make it easier for people to move themselves and stuff when there are appropriate roads to travel on. They have enhanced our abilities to do this, but they cannot run.
You're squashing the meaning out words by trying to suggest that "running" is somehow equivalent to "any other method of a person moving from A to B". But that's not true.
We can acknowledge the greater ease of cars for moving people and stuff without squashing the meaning out of words.
Finally, even the notion that cars are "better" at moving people and stuff needs careful examination. Thus far I have said "make it easier" because I am aware that by a certain set of metrics (related to energy use, material use, impact on the environment) cars are actually worse most of the time.
That's just an accidental property of the english language.
We can imagine a language where "runner" and "thing that moves from A to B fast" used the same term T, and if people referred to T with the english notion of "runner" (e.g. a person running in a marathon") it was just deduced from the context. There are many cases like that.
In any case, the point is moot, as "thinking" doesn't have the same constraints. We might not call what a car does as running/runner (though we do use the former term) but we absolutely have considered AI as "thinking" and called AIs "thinking machines", even before AI (never mind AGI) even existed.
>You're squashing the meaning out words by trying to suggest that "running" is somehow equivalent to "any other method of a person moving from A to B". But that's not true.
This depends on the level of abstraction of the discussion. At some level of abstraction it's irrelevant if the move happened via running or via horse buggy or via a car. Sometimes we just care about the act of moving from A to B, and different methods to do so are only differentiated by their speed or other effectiveness.
In that case, we can compare man and machine though, and just care for the speed (machine can answer in 0.1. secs, a man needs to think over 1-2 minutes to answer such questions) or effectiveness (e.g. machine is better at juggling many things at the same time when thinking, or man is better at subtle semantical nuance).
This isn't an accident of language. An example of an actual accident of language would be giving tanks instead of giving thanks.
Are runners runners? Yes, according to you. A walker is a runner is a missile is a bowling ball rolling between places is light moving through a medium. No, according to a fitness coach, because a runner is not a tank is not a plane. When they say that a person should take up running they don't mean the person should melt down their body in a furnace and sprinkle their atoms into metal which is then pressed into iron plates that are attached to a tank which will then go running.
Sometimes we need to be careful in language. For example, we probably don't want to confuse the process of being incinerated and pressed into iron plates with the process of a human exercising their muscles. The choice to be careful in this way is not an accident of language. It is a very deliberate thing when, for example, John Von Nuemann carefully explains why he thinks the laymen use of the word game has perilous impact on our ability to think about the field of game theory which he starts in his book about the same.
I think you should make your point so as to disprove Nuemann, not pick on the straw man of running. Or you should argue against the use of the term radiator instead of car parts. It will better highlight your fallacy, because with running I have to make your position seem much more farcial then it is. We do gain something from thinking imprecisely. We gain speed. That can really get our thoughts running, so long as we don't trip up, but it calls to attention that when someone chooses to stop running due to the claim that the terrain isn't runnable, the correct response is not to tell them that running is accidental property. It is to be careful as you move over the more complicated terrain. Otherwise you might be incinerating yourself without noticing your error.
By "Accident of language" I don't mean "slip of the tongue" or "mistake when speaking".
I mean that kind words we use to describe someome who runs as "runner" is an accidental, not essential, property of English, and can be different in other languages. It doesn't represent some deeper truth, other than being a reflection of the historical development of the English vocabulary. I mean it's contigent in the sense it's used in philosophy as: "not logically necessary"
Not just in its sounds (which are obviously accidental, different languages can have different sounds for a word of the same meaning), but also in its semantics and use, e.g. how we don't call a car a "runner".
That we don't call it that doesn't express some fundamental truth, it's just how English ended up. Other languages can very well call both a car and a running man the same thing, and even if they don't for this particular case, they do have such differences between them for all kinds of terms.
>* I think you should make your point so as to disprove Nuemann, not pick on the straw man of running.*
I'm not here to disprove Neumann. I'm here to point that Lanier's argument based on the use of "runner" doesn't contribute anything.
You are arguing on the basis of possibility of imprecision in language that the choice to be more precise does not contribute anything. That structure - whether you want it to or not - as a direct consequence of logic applies to every thinker who ever argued for precision due to the possibility of ambiguity. It is an argument against formal systems, programming languages, measurement, and more. Some of the time it will turn out that your conclusion was true. Other times it will not. So the argument structure itself is invalid. Your conclusions do not follow from your premises.
Try your blade - your argument structure - against steel rather than straw. I saw you slice through straw with it. So I picked up the blade after you set it down and tried to slice it through steel. The blade failed to do so. The blade is cheap, prone to shattering, and unsuited for use in a serious contest between ideas.
For what it is worth - I do happen to agree with you that Lanier is making a mistake here. I think it is in the logical equivalence mismatch. He wants intelligence to be comparable to running, not to motion more generally, but since intelligence is actually more comparable to compression we can talk of different implementations of the process using terms like artificial or natural intelligence without being fallacious for much the same reason we can talk about different compression algorithms and still be talking about compression. So instead of trying to argue from his distinction between motion in general and motion in humans, I would think the place to point to for contradiction is the existence of cheetah runners versus human runners. Directly contradicting his insinuation is that we actually do say that cheetah are faster runners than humans.
Cars are an easier method to move people and stuff when there are suitable routes, where easier means "the journey will take less time, will require almost no human exertion by those moved, and will likely include weather protection".
Nobody is going to disagree with this (they may raise the objections I did that cars are energetically, materially and environmentally less efficient than other means, but that doesn't invalidate "cars are easier for moving people+stuff").
But that's not running. I will concede that even in English, there are idioms like "Can you run me to town?" meaning "Can you drive me to town?", or "I'm just going to run to the store" meaning "I'm going take a short journey to the store". But this doesn't mean that cars are better at running than humans, it means that the english word run can be used in different ways. And you know exactly which way Lanier meant it.
I think that's not the point. We're in awe by the machines' performances and then confused in how that compares to our abilities.
The actual threat is that in our minds we narrow our own capabilities and limit the comparison such that the computer is in fact better.
When computers were first doing math quicker than humans, that might have touch some humans, sure. Similarly now that "AI"s produce convincing spam faster or photo realistic creative images — that hurts some, jobs or maybe a lot. But it doesn't come close to being "human" or "intelligent".
Quite the opposite, the point is that we are getting dumber by focusing on human traits that can be measured or emulated by machines.
For example, when we say computers can "do math" more quickly than human beings can, this is fine as a matter of loose or figurative common speech. But strictly speaking, do computers actually do math? Do they actually compute? No, they don't. The computation we say a computer is doing is in the eye of the beholder. A better way to characterize what's happening is that human beings are _using_ computers _computationally_. That is, the physical artifacts we call computers participate in human acts as instruments, but _strictly speaking_, it makes about as much sense to say computers compute as it is to say that pencils write, hammers nail, vacuums cleaners clean, or cars drive. These things participate in the human act, but only as instrument. Whereas when human beings compute they are objectively computing, computation is not what computers are objectively doing (both Kripke and Searle make good arguments here). These artifacts only make sense in light of human intentions, as instruments of human intention and act.
Human writing can be viewed similarly. Objectively, we only have some pigment arranged on some material. No analysis of a piece of written text will ever divulge its signification. Indeed, no analysis of a piece of text will demonstrate that what is being analyzed is a piece of text! Text, and even that something is a piece of text, needs to be interpreted as text to function as text in the eye of the reader. But the semantic content of the text is objectively real. It just exists in the mind of the reader.
So we need to be careful because we can easily commit category mistakes by way of projection and confusion.
Cars are faster on reasonable traversable terrain. Are they more or less energy efficient? Under what circumstances? Do they self navigate the best path around obstacles? Better is really subjective.
And this applies to the large language models too. Just like calculators, they are going to do some things better, or maybe cheaper. But I've played with them trying to get them to write non-trivial programs, and they really do fail confidently. I suspect the amount of source code online means that any common problem has been included in the training data, and the LLM constitutes a program. So, at this point for programming, it's fancy Google. And that has value, but it is not intelligence.
I am not saying we (as a society) shouldn't be worried about these developments. Near as I can tell, they will mostly be used to further concentrate wealth among the few, and drive people apart because we already can't settle on a common set of (reasonably) objective facts about what is going on -- both problems are probably the same thing from different perspectives...
This tendency on HN to annihilate discussions by stating that, for instance, flying is the same as running because your feet also touch the ground at some point when flying (it happens only at take off and landing but it still counts as running, right ?) is really something. Stop torturing definitions, it makes Carmackgod sad and they randomly switch off a bit on the mainframe every time you do that.
You're actually oversimplifying the matter to a point where an F-16 Hornet is a very fast runner. Which it isn't.
Like a lot of the stuff being done with large models certainly isn't thinking, but they can clearly characterize sets of data in ways that an unassisted human can't.
being able to answer based on a probabilistic assumption is not that great in general, they do it fast on a frozen knowledge base, it can be useful, sometimes is surprisingly good, but not that great in general.
When I asked for the 3 best wood shops near me it replied with a shop that does not sell wood, a shop that does not exist and a broken website of a former now closed wood shop.
Now can an AI train another AI to become "smarter" than it is?
It can't.
Can an AI train another AI to become better at "characterize sets of data" than it is?
It can't.
An unassisted AI is as helpless as the unassisted person, but can't even rely on the intelligence of the species.
It’s not a search engine, if you give it the necessary tools it can use a search engine for you to find these answers.
We know that the current stuff can't do a lot of things, and it isn't really that interesting to enumerate them.
A predictive text model having a poor grasp of wood shop and location doesn't seem hugely surprising.
Focusing on the "how" feels like you'd arrive at "a calculator isn't as good at calculating as a human, because it doesn't do it the same way, it doesn't have a brain".