10 March 2023 , 13:51
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Artificial Intelligence is taking our jobs and ChatGPT is more interesting to talk to than most of your friends, so it's understandable that people are wary of the emerging technology.
It can write news articles, university essays, and lyrics for songs, and some fear the AI word generator could be the start of the downfall of society.
But we have nothing to fear according to eminent linguist Noam Chomsky, who said that human intelligence is based on coming up with answers with small amounts of information - which separates us from the machines.
He went on to say that the technology is still relatively new, so the day where AI overtakes human intelligence "may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking".
US linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, speaking at a conference (AFP/Getty Images)What do you think about AI? Let us know in the comments...
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The cognitive scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said: "The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question.
"On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations."
"Whereas humans are limited in the kinds of explanations we can rationally conjecture, machine learning systems can learn both that the earth is flat and that the earth is round - They trade merely in probabilities that change over time."
Could AI develop into a threat to humanity one day? (Getty Images)The philosopher made the comments in an article in the New York Times, and said that OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing AI "have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence".
Chomsky isn't the first expert to wade into the debate - previously celebrity hypnotist Paul McKenna shared his opinion, and he believes we're now in a time of great opportunity - or danger.
He has warned that artificial intelligence could lead to cyborgs like Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator rising and trying to take over humanity, or all of human intelligence forming to become 'the singularity'.
Speaking to the Mirror, Paul said: "The way it's going with humanity is that with machine learning, you'll have a marriage of the species of humanity and cyber technology fairly soon and then we go through an evolutionary jump through which we can never return.
"That could be very good - or not. Basically, the AI and us will become the same thing, or rather we mutate into a new species - that's what will happen.
"In fact, we're already seeing it in a sense but at the moment I have to tap - as fast as I can think I have to tap, but eventually you'll have the neuro-link and you'll just Bluetooth with the cloud."