The popular understanding seems to be that the day is not far off when an artificial intelligence (AI) will be able to think like humans and interact, at least through languages, in a way that is indistinguishable from real humans. Such a day has been called “the singularity”, a pivotal moment for the human race. With the recent success of large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT, which are capable of interpreting language use and composing sentences, many think this day is imminent.
When confronted with such a possibility, Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, famously said, “But a machine surely cannot think!” He perhaps meant the concepts of thinking and intelligence can only apply to living objects; it would be grammatically and logically incorrect otherwise. Nevertheless, machines can indeed share some traits of human behaviour, so even without precise definitions of these terms, their increasing use for machines is perhaps germane. In fact, in the eventuality that we do go past the “singularity” – a proposition that sounds frightening – a machine may have to be treated someday like a person.
