{"id":167428,"date":"2025-11-07T06:22:15","date_gmt":"2025-11-07T06:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/167428\/"},"modified":"2025-11-07T06:22:15","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T06:22:15","slug":"is-a-i-amazing-or-are-we-simple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/167428\/","title":{"rendered":"Is A.I. Amazing or Are We Simple?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s starting to feel<\/strong> like artificial intelligence can actually understand us. Maybe we aren\u2019t as complicated as we thought. And Naomi Fry tells us why Ryan Murphy\u2019s \u201cpretty damn bad\u201d new legal drama might be worth a watch. Plus:<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

How convincing does the illusion of understanding have to be before you stop calling it an illusion?Illustration by Zach Lieberman<\/p>\n

James Somers<\/strong>
A writer and a computer programmer<\/p>\n

When large language models<\/strong> (L.L.M.s) such as ChatGPT first came on the scene, I grumpily avoided them. I figured they had pilfered much of the world\u2019s creative output, including some of my own, only to produce confident inaccuracy and mediocre poetry. I didn\u2019t quite see how they would fit into my life.<\/p>\n

But, then, I started to use A.I. in my work as a programmer, where things were moving fast. L.L.M.s are especially good at writing code, in part because code has more structure than prose, and because you can sometimes verify that code is correct. While the rest of the world was mostly just fooling around with A.I. (or swearing it off), I watched as some of the colleagues I most respect retooled their working lives around it. I got the feeling that if I didn\u2019t retool, too, I might fall behind.<\/p>\n

I noticed, in my programming work, that, as I asked L.L.M.s to complete increasingly complex tasks, it became harder to defend the notion that they were blindly stitching words together. They seemed to understand what I was asking them to do; they hoovered up not just the sense but the intricate details of my code. And they did it so quickly.<\/p>\n

Just yesterday, I used an A.I. model at work to help me get unstuck two or three times; on one of these occasions, I had the computer tackle a problem that I found daunting, letting it have a crack while I did something else\u2014lunch, I think, or a meeting\u2014and, when I came back, it had worked the problem out. This kind of experience is empowering, but also unnerving.<\/p>\n

For my piece in this week\u2019s issue<\/a>, in which I consider the question of whether A.I. might actually be thinking, I spoke with cognitive neuroscientists and A.I. researchers who report having had a similar experience. They are taken aback by these models. A machine that behaves with seeming understanding\u2014and which, because it\u2019s a machine, can be probed and controlled\u2014has become a \u201cmodel organism\u201d for studying and understanding itself. As one leading neuroscientist told me, \u201cthe advances in machine learning have taught us more about the essence of intelligence than anything that neuroscience has discovered in the past hundred years.\u201d<\/p>\n

The A.I.s of today are built on simple principles. If they\u2019re capable of something that resembles thinking, it might suggest that the human mind is not as impenetrable a mystery as we once believed. Another neuroscientist I talked to, reckoning with that possibility, said something that really surprised me: he is \u201cworried these days that we might succeed in understanding how the brain works.\u201d Think of that: a neuroscientist who dreads the very discovery his field was founded to make. \u201cPursuing this question,\u201d he said, \u201cmay have been a colossal mistake for humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read or listen to the story \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n

Editor\u2019s Pick\"A<\/p>\n

Trier wants his actors to be comfortable enough on set to make \u201cmistakes,\u201d and directs them with \u201ctender encouragement,\u201d explaining, \u201cPeople work better that way\u2014at least, the people I want to work with.\u201dPhotograph by Knut Egil Wang for The New Yorker<\/p>\n

Joachim Trier Has Put Oslo on the Cinematic Map<\/p>\n

The idea of a place<\/strong> being as much a character in a film as a person is a clich\u00e9. But, Margaret Talbot writes, \u201cit\u2019s a clich\u00e9 that Trier has made his own.\u201d The Norwegian director has set three of his previous six movies (including the 2021 breakout hit \u201cThe Worst Person in the World\u201d) in his country\u2019s capital city. His latest, \u201cSentimental Value,\u201d is no different; it\u2019s another intimate character study set in Oslo. And his approach to directing is as empathic as his films. Read the story \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n

More Top Stories<\/p>\n

How Bad Is It?<\/p>\n

\u201cAll\u2019s Fair,\u201d<\/strong> Ryan Murphy\u2019s new celebrity-heavy legal drama, starring Kim Kardashian, is now streaming on Hulu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s starting to feel like artificial intelligence can actually understand us. Maybe we aren\u2019t as complicated as we…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154606,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261],"tags":[800,291,289,290,44308,18,19,17,7068,82,90392,90391,806],"class_list":{"0":"post-167428","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-_sensitivecontent","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-disable-inline-signup-unit","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-onecolumnnarrow","17":"tag-technology","18":"tag-textabovecentersmallwithrule","19":"tag-the-daily","20":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115506980238088290","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}