Douglas Hofstadter has changed his mind about A.I.---and is afraid

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Douglas Hofstadter was one of my favorite grad school professors nearly a half century ago. He was always very unenthusiastic about Artificial Intelligence and would sometimes say, “It just doesn’t interest me.” and “It is unlikely to ever do _____.” So this NYT article about Dr. Hofstadter’s shocking change of mind caught my attention:

I recalled a somewhat related conversation we once had at a department colloquium when I came upon this statement from a podcast interview: “It’s a very traumatic experience when some of your most core beliefs about the world start collapsing. And especially when you think that human beings are soon going to be eclipsed.”

I guess a lot can happen in a half century.

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Consider me underwhelmed. But then I was never a fan of Hofstadter.

I still think of AI as a problem that is half-solved. They have the “artificial” part working. Yes, these tools are getting to be very good at what they do well. But they are not on their way toward being conscious.

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I can’t read it. But there were other new technologies that were accompanied by some who predicted disaster from it.

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