The metaphor of the mirror, which gives this book its title and defining analogy, is designed to show that AI remains miles away from being anything like real human intelligence. By attending to that gap, between reality and reflection, we can find essential clues about what makes us human. Shannon Vallor, a professor in the ethics of data and AI at the University of Edinburgh, invites us to consider the image that appears in the bathroom mirror every morning: “The body in the mirror is not a second body taking up space in the world with you.
It is not a copy of your body. It is not even a pale imitation of your body. The mirror-body is not a body at all.
A mirror produces a reflection of your body. Reflections are not bodies. They are their own kind of thing.
By the same token, today’s AI systems trained on human thought and behaviour are not minds. They are their own new kind of thing – something like a mirror.” It’s a useful metaphor.
Because it’s easy to mistake clever computational tools – which can rapidly scour enormous data sets, discern patterns and then make projections – for true intelligence. Conflating the two both underplays the complexity of the human mind and overplays the creeping misunderstanding that we are getting close to replicating it. Worse still, in our fascination with the AI mirror, we risk becoming intoxicated not by an exciting new kind of intelligence, but with an incomplete image of ourselves.
Vallor recounts the tale of Narcissu.