19 July

Let me reframe the AI ‘debate’ in this way. Rather than worry about the extent to which AI is actually thinking, and replacing human thinking, go back a step. Nobody ever could define what thinking is in the first place. When Darwin began to study life, it was similarly a transcendent concept. Thought to come from God, or for the secular from a ‘vital’ force. What did Darwin do? He ignored all of that theorising, and focused obsessively on the case-by-case specific *details* of life, as it actually exists. By focusing on the actual details, he discovered that what we call ‘life’ is actually intelligible, and not separate to matter. And that’s what AI is doing right now. The discipline of building machines that actually think is forcing us to unpack all of the abstract ideas about thought and consciousness that never went anywhere, because they were removed from the actual details of life. On a case-by-case basis. Nothing tests ideas better than the discipline of them actually having to WORK. Thinking and consciousness, like life, are changing from transcendent ideas nobody understands, to basic empirical realities. As Bruno Latour said, we think much more with our eyes and our hands, than we do with our brains.