The Evaporating Promise of AGI: An Economist’s View

ID The Future listeners now get to enjoy two episodes each month from our sister podcast Mind Matters News, a production of the Discovery Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. The Mind Matters News podcast brings you insight from computer scientists, engineers, inventors, neurosurgeons, and other experts who bring sanity to the conversation about natural and artificial intelligence, going beyond the hype to explore the undercurrents of these important ideas. And although the Mind Matters News podcast will not often explicitly discuss intelligent design, it regularly explores the nature of intelligence, the origin of information, and the things that make us uniquely human, all concepts that are central to the theory of intelligent design. Enjoy today’s offering of Mind Matters News! In this installment of the Mind Matters News podcast, host Robert J. Marks welcomes economics professor and author Gary Smith to discuss the hype around artificial general intelligence (AGI) and AI's impact on the market. Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Ponoma College and a frequent contributor to Mind Matters News. Smith argues that generative AI, embodied in services like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, exhibits many characteristics of past market bubbles, including excessive hype, lack of profitability, and unrealistic expectations. Smith holds that generative AI models have limited practical economic value. They may be good at finding statistical patterns but struggle to distinguish meaningful, useful correlations from coincidental ones. Smith describes the fundamental challenge of teaching machines true understanding that goes beyond mere pattern recognition. A number of examples and stories are shared throughout. Source