> the kind of predictions humans are extremely bad in the first place? most people cant even grok anything beyond basic math.
We use reasoning/planning all the time in everyday settings - it's not just for math or puzzle solving. Anytime you have to pause for a second to wonder how to do something, or what to say, as opposed to acting or speaking reactively, that's reasoning/planning being used.
Reasoning/planning is a key part of intelligence and why evolution has equipped us with large costly brains - so that we can survive and thrive in varied environments and in novel situations, per our species' adaptation as generalists. Human's are extraordinarily good at reasoning - if you want an example of an animal that can't then a cow or croc would be a better example!
> the kind of predictions humans are extremely bad in the first place
Humans are extremely good at it, basically every human can learn to drive cars safely in novel neighborhoods, that is a skill only humans posses today, no animals or machines can do it and it requires a very impressive level of learning and reasoning.
Some humans struggle with symbols, but that doesn't make them dumb, symbols are so far off from our native way of thinking. To an LLM however those symbols is its native mode of thinking, that is all it has, if it is as dumb as an untrained human at symbol manipulation tasks then it is really really bad.
> basically every human can learn to drive cars safely in novel neighborhoods
You sure about that?
I was raised in the UK; both my experience of cycling the Rhine and being the passenger when my brother was driving in France, was that we each picked the wrong side of the road once per day.
I doubt either of us has any intuition for a moose or a kangaroo on the road.
Also, she crashed her car in start-stop traffic, a write-off at about 20 mph. And I was cycling to work one day, and a driver, who had stopped at a minor-to-major junction, didn't look my way and pulled out into me as I was passing in front of him — wrote off my bike, probably around 10 mph or less.
I've been in places where red lights are obeyed, and others where they're treated as suggestions.
> Some humans struggle with symbols, but that doesn't make them dumb, symbols are so far off from our native way of thinking. To an LLM however those symbols is its native mode of thinking, that is all it has, if it is as dumb as an untrained human at symbol manipulation tasks then it is really really bad.
I disagree; a computer can be perfectly symbolic, but an AI has to learn those symbols and their relations from scratch. This is why ChatGPT is so much worse at arithmetic than the hardware it's operating on.
But in terms of how our brain works, and why it evolved, it really is prediction.
Prediction allows us to behave according to what is about to happen (or what we want to happen) as opposed to just reacting to what is happening right now. "I predict the sabre-tooth is going to run towards me, so I better be prepared", is more adaptive than "Ouch! this fucker has big teeth!".
When we're driving (well) we're continually predicting what other drivers/pedestrians are going to do, what's the best lane to be in for next exit, etc, etc.
the kind of predictions humans are extremely bad in the first place? most people cant even grok anything beyond basic math.