[Italics from original missing here.]

There is a meteor falling towards a large lake. At first, its reflection in the lake is very small. At first, it has no shadow at all. Next, its shadow becomes very large and mild. Gradually, at first, and then very quickly, the shadow shrinks, becomes darker. The reflection, too, shrinks. At last, the shadow, the reflection, and the meteor all meet — their proportions by now roughly the same, the mappings between their representations more straightforward than ever, and then there is a splash.

There has been no form automated, so far, that was not already the stuff of an artificial intelligence. This is not some sort of coincidence. It has to do with the structure of our conceptions of automation, intelligence, artifice. If a form has been successfully automated, then it had a regularity, a pattern. If a pattern was being carried out by an intelligence, the intelligence was leaning heavily on the pattern. In its capacity as the executor of a pattern or rule, intelligence is already artificial — that is, it is already the intelligence of that artifice, that rule, which it is following. More precisely, the intelligence has become indistinguishable from — or of roughly the same proportions as — the pattern, within the bounds of this one particular form. In the case of an individual truly devoted to the form in question, the individual's intelligence has been effectively subsumed — dissolved — in the form. (Worship as the identification of oneself with a pattern.) The existential hysteria over artificial intelligence, which is far from peaking, is therefore both nonsensical and wise. It is nonsensical because, if the machine can do it, then it was not such a very special, human thing. It is wise, because, unlike in the case of the meteor, as the reflection of the machine grows larger, that which is special about the human shrinks; we are not watching the meteor hit our world from the shore, we are riding the meteor, and the reflection is, in growing, pulling us closer to itself.

A language model is, roughly, a multidimensional index of patterns. The question of whether the scaling of language models can take them (the language models) all the way through to human intelligence sounds like a question about whether language models are missing some quasi-tangible kernel that is present in humans (present in their brains, in their ...

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