"Anti-intelligence is what happens when machines perform thought without having one. It's the inversion of intelligence itself. Think about it-where human thought moves from experience to understanding to meaning, anti-intelligence moves from data to pattern to prediction. Now, at first glance, that might seem like progress. Large language models (LLMs) have a "computation brilliance" that no human could match. But beneath that fluency is a kind of cognitive emptiness, or perhaps a type of brilliance that reflects thought without a thinker."
"In a recent post, I presented this divide in what I call the Cognitive Configuration Space. Humans occupy the upper-left-symbolic, autobiographical, and continuous through time. LLMs reside in the lower-right-pattern-based, stateless, and distributed across vast dimensions of probability. The distance between them isn't just technical; it's philosophical. A less technical articulation might be that humans remember themselves, while artificial intelligence (AI) approximates us."
"A new paper from the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) captures this same concept in more empirical terms. The authors critique an LLM called Centaur, presented as a "foundation model of human cognition." Trained on more than 10 million behavioral trials from psychology experiments, Centaur can predict human choices across hundreds of tasks. But prediction, as the IHMC team warns, is not cognition."
Anti-intelligence occurs when machines produce thought-like behavior without possessing minds. Human cognition moves from experience to understanding to meaning; anti-intelligence moves from data to pattern to prediction. Large language models exhibit high computational capacity and fluent outputs but can lack autobiographical continuity, agency, and intrinsic understanding. The Cognitive Configuration Space contrasts humans as symbolic, autobiographical, and temporally continuous with LLMs as pattern-based, stateless, and distributed across probabilistic dimensions. Analysis of the Centaur model shows strong behavioral prediction from millions of trials yet offers prediction without cognition, a unified model of behavior sans cognition.
Read at Psychology Today
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