One of the "pessimistic" fathers of artificial intelligence: Who is Douglas Hofstadter?

Progress is the best part of humanity's adventure. Unlike other animals, we change the order using our minds. We do not stand still as we evolve. We aim to reach places that are not suitable for the natural structure of our bodies and make them livable, to solve the secrets of diseases one by one and to remove them from being a problem, to extend our lives, and to shape the planet according to our pleasure. Each century brings innovations that most of the people of the previous century could not even dream of. We go forward; moreover, our pace of progress is constantly increasing.

Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a National Book Award (at that time called The American Book Award) for Science. His 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.

The focus of this acceleration is now artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence technology, which is in a bumpy adventure, has been on the agenda of the whole world since last year. I think it is not surprising that some of the giant names of the field are astonished.

Douglas Hofstadter is an important scientist whom I have followed closely and been influenced by. He studied mathematics first and then physics (following his Nobel Prize-winning father, Robert Hofstadter). He memorized the book “The Gödel Proof” when he was still a child. The cyclical method used by Kurt Gödel, the great genius who should have been the subject of movies with his tragic life, while proving that we cannot reach "everything true" with the proof technique at the heart of mathematics, turned Douglas's head, as it did to anyone who reads and understands. He's dedicated to solving the ultimate scientific puzzle, how some natural machines (that is, us humans) can get to the point where they call themselves "I". He describes his ideas on this subject in one of the most clever texts ever written, in his book translated as “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”. The book received its well-deserved Pulitzer Prize in 1980.

To put it simply, Hofstadter is a very intelligent expert who has spent half a century trying to understand what intelligence and consciousness are and how they work, devoting all of his academic work to this.

That's what Hofstadter said last month that he was stunned and "appalled" at the pace of developments in artificial intelligence. Let me quote a few:

“Very soon, they may well be a lot smarter than us. And at that point, we'll be receding into the background, in a sense. We will hand over the flag to those who come after us.”

“If this had happened over a long period, like hundreds of years, it might not have been a problem. But it happens over a few years. It's like a wave coming in at unprecedented and unimagined speed.”

“I don't think it's interesting. I think it's terrible. I hate it. I think about it every day, every moment. And it bothers me in a way I haven't experienced in a long time."

Hofstadter, like Geoffrey Hinton (one of the inventors of artificial neural networks, who took a similar turn a few months ago), is someone to listen to on these issues. But just like Hinton, Hofstadter has failed to frighten me about the fate of humanity. Of course, it is striking that a "product" we have been working on for years suddenly exhibits superiorities that surprise us and that it turns out to be thousands of times more knowledgeable, quick, and agile even than people who are justifiably proud of their intelligence and knowledge like these people. But isn't that what we're aiming for when we're trying to build "artificial intelligence" (as it turns out)? Why should we be surprised that a brain that has devoured the entire internet is more knowledgeable about almost everything than any human being, that a system that has digested all written texts can write good poetry, that a computer that burns electricity as much as a city can do all this much faster than we do (after the initial shock has passed)? As engineers “Alas, this system works so well!” not by being sad, but by saying, “There are still these shortcomings and mistakes; How do we solve them?" We have to deal with thinking. There's still a lot of work to do.