Since Chat GPT came out I feel like Egan really lost the plot on that one, already when discussing on Twitter. It felt like a combination of rejection of the “bitter lesson” (understandable: I too find inelegant and downright offensive to my aesthetic sense that brute force deep learning seems to work better than elegantly designed GOFAI, but whatever it is, it does undeniably work ), and political cognitive dissonance that says that if people who wrongthink support AI, and evil billionaires throw their weight behind AI, therefore AI is bad, and therefore it must be a worthless scam, because it’s important to believe it is (this of course can to some extent work if you persuade the investors of it; but in the end it’s mostly a hopeless effort when all you have is angry philosophical rambling and all they have is a freaking magical computer program that speaks to you. I know which one is going to impress people more).
So basically, yeah, I understand the reasons to be annoyed, disgusted, scared and offended by reality. But it is reality, and I think Egan is in denial of it, which seems to have resulted in a novel.
Since Chat GPT came out I feel like Egan really lost the plot on that one, already when discussing on Twitter. It felt like a combination of rejection of the “bitter lesson” (understandable: I too find inelegant and downright offensive to my aesthetic sense that brute force deep learning seems to work better than elegantly designed GOFAI, but whatever it is, it does undeniably work ), and political cognitive dissonance that says that if people who wrongthink support AI, and evil billionaires throw their weight behind AI, therefore AI is bad, and therefore it must be a worthless scam, because it’s important to believe it is (this of course can to some extent work if you persuade the investors of it; but in the end it’s mostly a hopeless effort when all you have is angry philosophical rambling and all they have is a freaking magical computer program that speaks to you. I know which one is going to impress people more).
So basically, yeah, I understand the reasons to be annoyed, disgusted, scared and offended by reality. But it is reality, and I think Egan is in denial of it, which seems to have resulted in a novel.