Allen Roberts’s Reviews > The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning > Status Update

“There are people in AI circles who… believe humankind, in developing artificial intelligence, is building something that will ultimately have God-like abilities and, maybe, God-like power—power comparable to that of a global brain that presides over the planet.” p. 48

“Of all the parallels between the evolution of the human brain and the evolution of a large language model, one of the most momentous is this: Both forms of evolution have produced thinking machines whose inner workings aren’t well understood.” p. 32

“You feed a machine strings of symbols that, though meaningful to humans, are, from the machine’s point of view, pure gibberish. And you give the machine no information about what these strings mean to humans. And, in an important sense, the machine proceeds to ‘figure out’ their meaning.” p. 14