“AI is neither smart nor artificial,” says Nicolelis.

Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis said, in an interview with Folha de S. Paulo, this Saturday (08), that “artificial intelligence” is “neither intelligent nor artificial”. The researcher also criticized the Israeli writer Yuval Harari, author of “Sapiens” and the ChatGPT tool.

“From a scientific point of view, I’ve been saying this for years, and now Noam Chomsky uses the same phrase, AI is neither intelligent nor artificial. It is not artificial because it is of our making, it is natural. And it is not intelligent because intelligence is an emergent property of organisms interacting with the environment.” And with other organisms. It’s a product of Darwin’s process of natural selection. An algorithm can walk and do things, but it’s not intelligent by definition,” Nicolelis explains.

The scientist has been working with neural networks for 30 years, and they are the mechanism behind current machine learning algorithms. As an authority on brain-machine interfaces, he has worked on developing neural prostheses capable of reproducing body movements. At the opening of the 2014 World Cup, in Rio de Janeiro, a wheelchair user kicked the ball into the goal with the help of equipment he developed.

According to Nicolelis, it is “ridiculous” to claim that language paradigms like ChatGPT are 10 times smarter than humans. “In a way, ChatGPT is a great impersonator, because it takes material that has been made by a group of people, mixes it up and creates something that it calls a new product, but is actually very much influenced by the intellectual product of thousands upon thousands of human beings. For the modern capitalist system, AI is the great marketing tool , Because it generates complete inequality in the relationship with the workforce. A manager can say: I have an artificial intelligence application, if a worker does not accept the salary that I want to pay him, which is 10% of what he earns today, I fire him and use the application. There is a whole ideology, says the researcher To replace human labor, which cannot be done 100%, there is no way.

About Yoval Harari’s “Sapiens” work, Nicolelis says the Israeli writer “mixes things from other areas without deep knowledge.” “At Sapiens, the reviewer mixes up and interprets our results in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with what we did. It’s a job that I’ve spent 30 years of my life doing. When he says that in the future we’re going to put this thing called a brain-brain interface, which was an experimental thing I did with mice, I’ve done it with monkeys and we’ve done it with humans for rehab. But it’s not that I’m going to exchange my feelings with other people. It’s an exchange of engine commands, proper things to reduce digital logic. He interpreted it as if I was reading someone’s mind, which would never happen. He says:” We will live to be 200 years old”, “we will put an end to old age”. It is all fiction, ”explains Nicolelis.

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