This song captures extraordinarily well why arguments about AI understanding are completely misguided and empty.
This is a blues version of “Without Me” by Eminem from the 1950s. It’s is an objectively stunning piece of music, and it’s quite different from the original.
If music makes you dance and feel things, it’s real.
If AI models and scaffolding can be assembled into a product that can replace human workers, it’s intelligent (i.e., it has the ability to understand, pursue, and accomplish goals).
If a technology that can perform a task and produce an output that requires understanding, it understands.
In this frame, understanding is the ability of an actor to interpret a given task and desired outcome well enough to create an acceptable result.
AI can clearly do that now.
It’s true that if you break open a neural net or a human brain and start poking at it with a stick, a scalpel, or an electron microscope, there is no place to point at and say, “This is understanding.” Or, “This is intelligence.”
But it’s there because we see the outputs that prove it’s there.
We should stop wasting cycles on “does it understand” or “is it intelligent”. Or “It can’t be intelligent because”.
All these behaviors in both animals and technology are the result of emergent functionality, and the issue is that we still lack transparency into emergence itself. Not just for tech, not just for LLMs, not just for AI, but for humans and other animals as well.
Let’s not confuse that opacity of emergence itself, which is a universal human problem, with a specific implementation of that emergence opacity in a new intelligence stack.
Judge capabilities by their ground-truth outputs. In other words,
- In your lexicon, did the creation of that output require understanding and/or intelligence if it were a human doing it?
- And did a non-human technology produce it?
Then that technology understands, and is intelligent.