> But we’ve just shown you how this apparent intelligence arises from the bottom up, with just four neurons and two connections. There’s no magic here. In this view, behavior emerges from neural circuits.
Isn't the conclusion here that very simple behaviors like the sparks are intelligent? I would say even a single neuron has some tiny amount of intelligence, and what the author means by "no magic" and "emergent behavior" is just a different perspective that minimizes it.
Take out the "human" and it's all just algos on a scale of complexity.
In fact I think this is a particularly important distinction right now, that intelligence seems (to me somewhat unexpectedly/counterintuitively) somewhat independent from consciousness, at least as far as artificial systems go (for example, old school chess engines are much capable than humans at chess but are definitely not sentient or conscious).
It's come to be foundational to much of western thinking beyond psychology
A topical example is a portion of society believing that the top Ai researchers should be setting domestic political and economic policy, foreign affairs, and chem/bio weapon controls... instead of the experts in those fields. We extrapolate their above average capabilities in building Ai into an artificial general intelligence where it is not due.
It seems like no one stops to ask, "isn't it kind of bad that we're developing this system of machine intelligence to be our code-writing slaves, without ever really interrogating the ethics? Maybe we don't actually understand how our own brains function well enough to assert it's not similar (especially as language goes) to these kind of weighted association graphs?"
Or even the "well we made it, so it's ours" responses, which we sort of answered a long time ago when we decided kids aren't property, but I digress...
To be clear, Anthropic does seem to be taking this somewhat seriously. Their reports on training always discuss model wellfare, they ban abusive behavior toward the AI, etc. At one point they were asking some philosophers and theologists about the implications of this all.
And they're pretty relentlessly mocked and called a "cult" for doing so, even on this forum.
A line follower with 5 photodiodes and a simple loop steering towards bright or dark lines (pid or not) works, just like the example of following light with two neurons.
When I did hobby robotics competition, some would train neural nets for this, many just had crude for loops, and most often it was PID.