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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   21711 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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This is the classic AI effect. I think even if we get super intelligent robots that can outclass humans at literally everything we do, there will still be Gary Marcus types saying they aren’t really intelligent because they don’t make mistakes like humans do, or some other excuse.

In another thread, I echoed the idea that LLMs don't model the universe. So for example, if you play chess with an LLM, there's no model of a chessboard in the system, which is why it sometimes makes illegal moves.

That’s because the LLM doesn’t “see” the board and is effectively playing correspondence chess. I bet most humans who aren’t very well trained would also make illegal moves if they had to keep the whole board state in their head.

If you ask the LLM to print out the board in ASCII before doing a move, the problem is essentially solved.

Visual/spatial intelligence in AI agents is lagging behind pure text based reasoning of course, but I don’t think the arguments will change once we have proof that they have very accurate world models.

I think even if we get super intelligent robots that can outclass humans at literally everything we do, there will still be Gary Marcus types saying they aren’t really intelligent because they don’t make mistakes like humans do, or some other excuse.

I agree that the AI effect is real, but what I'm describing is something a little different. Clearly at the moment, AIs have not reached human level intelligence, even though they can realistically simulate human conversation. In other words, passing the Turing Test is not AI-complete. That's a surprise to me.

That’s because the LLM doesn’t “see” the board and is effectively playing correspondence chess. I bet most humans who aren’t very well trained would also make illegal moves if they had to keep the whole board state in their head.

That may be so, but I don't think it undermines my point. Humans can and do create models (although sometimes we use physical objects outside of our brains as part of the model, such as chessboards or calendars). LLMs create models only at a rudimentary level as far as I know. Perhaps a better example of a model used by humans would be something to keep track of what's going on in our social circles. Who hates whom; who's having sex with whom; who knows what about whom; etc.

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