Top physicist: chatbots ‘glorified tape recorders’, predicts revolution ahead

I dont think there's much to discuss about this article because Kaku's opinion on AI is worthless.

He is less a physicist than a parrot that is paid to repeat far fetched claims about whatever pop science thing is in the news.

The most-charitable interpretation I can think of is that some folks are reading the title, thinking "I agree, chatbots are overhyped", and voting before moving on.

So they don't see the incoherence of the article because they never click, or else they don't have the historical context to see how it's bizarre to present Kaku as a voice against "media sensationalism".

If it's cloudflare and you're in linux or a less than dominant browser, I've just relegated myself to adding the Privacy Pass extension... Which seems to help resolve the issue.

do you have anything to say about the points he's making, or just here to judge the person ?

Kaku is a media sensationalist; that class of person has a terrible track record. Futurists, that is, people like Aasimov, have an ok track record at predicting the future. Interestingly, early futurist predictions about digital tech were pretty good. For "physical" goods? Not so much. A plausible explanation of this discrepancy is that they didn't predict the breakdown in the historial trend of increasing energy usage. See the Henry Adams curve.

He might have been a “top physicist”, but it appears he has long since started phoning it in.

See the link to Aaronsons blog elsewhere in the thread for an example of the kind of drivel Kaku puts out, and why he shouldn’t be taken seriously.

string field theory is a a "field" of physics which is entirely theoretical and has no experiment data to back it up.... hard to imagine how even the top person in that field would be a top physicist given the large number of top physicists who are doing useful stuff like LIGO, CERN, etc.

That reminds me of giving your kids The Quantum Computing Talk... Which now that I look at it, Aaronson was involved in too:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3