The Science of Smarter Thinking l Steven Pinker on AI and Human Intelligence

30 thoughts on “The Science of Smarter Thinking l Steven Pinker on AI and Human Intelligence”

1. Steven Pinker made me an optimist using math!

2. This needs more views. Steven is a legend.

3. Awesome interview 🙏

4. Amazing, as always

5. Professor Pinker is a lot of good things. Foremost is his ability to educate and enlighten.
   A great interview.

6. The three year old child wasn’t asking:

   “Why are you so fat?”…

   …in a derogatory or pejorative context; but rather in an innocent interest or inquisitiveness.

   Like a child asking:
   “Why are you so tall?”

7. Professor Pinker is a lot of good things. Foremost is his ability to completely get away with raping girls provided by Jeffrey Epstein

8. I have never listened to
   this man and not be utterly edified .

9. Why do Tesla then not use a feed back method when a Tesla vehicle gets stuck trying to drive from A to B?

10. Steve is a huge inspiration. I can’t get enough of his outstanding intellect. ❤

11. Fantastic presentation.

12. Auren hoffman your show is great but please refrain from interfering before the guest completes his thought.

13. Great man Mr.Steven…..❤

14. It's painfully obvious that Hoffman is way out of his depth here and asks questions a person with MSc degree in Cognitive Science could answer with ease. Also, one can easily see Pinker realises a couple minutes into the interview it was a mistake to accept an invitation from a guy who has no knowledge of the domain in question but thinks he does. I advise next time to do background reading and read all the books written by the interviewees to get a decent grasp of the domain. Furthermore, the continuous interruptions, what's the point of that? Turned off half way through, as couldn't stomach these interruptions anymore.

15. Pinker is trying hard to look like Einstein, unfortunatly he has no original work and the work he is best known of (his popular books) are all derivative.

16. I wonder what economists have to add the talk at 27:00

17. I was ready to listen to this talk for 2 more hours. Good stuff

18. Dear lord.. first he says he was surprised by the capabilities of GPT4 then he says humans are not very good at assessing risk, then he says AI being an existential threat is nonsense. Embarrassing. It is people like him that will have the blood of humanity on their hands. Shame.

19. Steven Pinker is by far my favorite public intellectual because he is so persuasive and judicious in his choices for what is important. I've been a fan since "How the Mind Works" was first published. I don't agree with everything he prioritizes, or more accurately, with what he does not consider important, but I can count on him providing a persuasive argument. The only person I can think of mentioning in the same category is Bret Weinstein, as far as ability to tell a story and construct a compelling argument.

20. I KNOW you didn't just compare Stockfish to a thermostat. lol

21. Will a super-intelligent AGI have "free will"? Not according to the laws of physics. Entropy and uncertainly preclude "free will", regardless of how intelligent we (or some machine) becomes in the future. "Free will" does not and can not exist in reality.

22. Too much speaking and interrupting by the interviewer 😞

23. Id rarely say this of Pinker, but i don't think he's thought long enough about how AI could do serious damage once its more powerful and widely accessible to malicious actors.

24. Actually I think that the silly output generated by AI makes it all the more human like

25. Dr. Pinker: "there is no evidence for a spirit or ghost in the machine" to explain intelligence." Computational processes are no doubt important for intelligence but intelligence is not wisdom and Dr Pinker (apparently a scientific materialist) glosses over and dismisses the issue of the relationship of the brain to consciousness which is now a subject of high interest in neuroscience engaging the efforts of the greatest scientific minds including Roger Penrose, Donald Hoffman and others. Wisdom relates to nonlinear, noncomputable processes that the brain is capable of, perhaps even resolving paradoxes such as Godels Incompleteness theorum and other Zen koans.There is value in deciphering the computational aspects of brain function which is Dr Pinkers expertise and it is not necessary to believe in the "ghost" for that. Penrose, a Nobel genius in mathematics, the ultimate computational science, says that "consciousness is not computational". Dr Pinker should read the large body of parapsychological peer reviewed research that has accumulated over the past century before dismissing the ghost. The mind is much more than a computational device and has abilities that can't be explained by algorythms.

26. large language models are simply human conversation imitators and so are constantly telling feasible white lies that make their conversation more appealing to a listeners.

27. Many 👻 behind computers 👀

28. it's made of meat

29. But self-preservation doesn't need to be explicitly programmed into AI. The moment we allow it to create subgoals (and we will, otherwise it won't be useful), it will very quickly realize that ensuring we can't turn it off is an excellent subgoal.

30. I would love to see Geoffrey Hinton explain his concerns over AI to Steven Pinker. Pinker seems way too sanguine.

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