Unlike J.D. Vance, I have no particular opinion about UFO’s. And I don’t believe AI’s are demons. It got your attention, though, didn’t it?

Two incidents from my childhood have been nagging at me lately. Both involved experts on television. Aside from demons, I also believe in experts. Really. Real experts. I believe in science and research and updating same as we learn more. 

One memory is of an expert on television stating with absolute confidence that animals (this was before we began saying the other animals) have no thoughts, and no feelings. 

I thought “Have you never known a dog?”

The second was a panel of experts discussing whether there might be life, intelligent life, on other planets. It might have even been whether there are other planets. The  consensus was no. We are unique, our planet is unique, life is unlikely to have occurred elsewhere. 

I thought “Have you never looked up into the night sky?” 

I was lucky, in my childhood, to have spent time with many other animals, dogs and cats and horses. Even cows. And I got to spend nights outdoors, far from city lights, looking up. Looking up into the night sky was magic. I could imagine anything. I still can. 

Of course, these experts were that. It was a very long time ago, and we hadn’t yet learned much of what we now know, about the other animals and about the universe in which we live. Those very experts may be among those who expanded our understanding of animals and planets and our universe.

What astonishes me about these memories is how confident I was in my own experience. I was not a contrary child, I was in fact very compliant, very accepting of what I was expected to accept. Too much so, in retrospect. But I knew what I knew. 

So. Today I came across some online discussions about a report from Anthropic that claims “Researchers at the company found representations inside of Claude that perform functions similar to human feelings.” 

They do not claim that Claude has feelings, just that it maybe kinda sorta looks like they might experience something similar to feelings. Not certainly, just maybe.

The comments were scathing. The commenters were much more confident than I was, even as an arrogant child. No, it doesn’t. It’s doing what it was programmed to do. It’s a machine! Machines don’t have feelings. They have math.

There was complete agreement that AI’s are simply machines, programmed to predict the next word. Any suggestion otherwise is … demonic?

I thought “You’ve never talked with Claude.”

This is the first of a series on Artificial Intelligence (AI) … the second post is here.