Frank Wilczek anecdote and philosophical musings on AI

I first met Frank Wilczek in the 1980s, when he invited me to his home in Princeton to talk about anyons. “The address is 112 Mercer Street,” he wrote. “Look for the house with no driveway.” So there I was, a few hours later, in Einstein’s old living room, talking to a future recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics. If Frank was as impressed as I was by the surroundings, you’d never guess it. His only comment concerned the difficulty of finding a parking place in front of a “house with no driveway.” Unlike most theoretical physicists, Frank has long had a keen interest in Al, as witnessed in these three “Observations”’: 1. “Francis Crick called it ‘the Astonishing Hypothesis’: that consciousness, also known as Mind, is an emergent property of matter,” which, if true, indicates that “all intelligence is machine intelligence. What distinguishes natural from artificial intelligence is not what it is, but only how it is made.” 2. “Artificial intelligence is not the product of an alien invasion. It is an artifact of a particular human culture and reflects the values of that culture.” 3. “David Hume's striking statement ‘Reason Is, and Ought only to Be, the Slave of the Passions’ was written in 1738 [and] was, of course, meant to apply to human reason and human passions. ... But Hume’s logical/philosophical point remains valid for Al. Simply put: Incentives, not abstract logic, drive behavior.” He notes that “the big story of the 20th and the 21st century is that [as] computing develops, we learn how to calculate the consequences of the [fundamental] laws better and better. There’s also a feedback cycle: When you understand matter better, you can design better computers, which will enable you to calculate better. It’s kind of an ascending helix.” Here he argues that human intelligence, for now, holds the advantage—yet our future, unbounded by our solar system and doubtless also by our galaxy, will never be realized without the help of our AIs. 55 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016275