In 1976, computers could play trivial text games In 2025, you can have a voice conversation with an AI from your phone (itself a computer) Not even the most optimistic 1976 computer scientist or futurist predicted or foresaw this Yet JW, an AI skeptic, would not have been surprised?

You don't know who he is, huh?

Eliza guy

Which should tell you that he wouldn't have been surprised or changed his mind. He's the expert and he's skeptical.

That doesn't follow at all His thing was the ethics and morality or computers and AI He said nothing about capabilities or timelines At the end of his life, AI was emerging from a Winter phase. Literally no one predicted the capabilities that have since emerged

It seems like you're implying those capabilities mean he was wrong on the ethics and actual limits of AI today. He wasn't. They will NEVER be sentient. Not really.

It may seem like that, but that's on you, not me My view is that he would be: 1. Astonished 2. Horrified

At what, exactly? What, specifically, are the objects of astonish and horrify?

LLMs

Compute heavy autocomplete. It’s just mindless matrix multiplications and linear algebra on a data set.

In and of themselves? Doubt it, it’s pretty exactly the same thing he was speaking about in the OP quote. The way people are treating them as if they are something magical and actually “intelligent”, whatever that means? Sure. Which was my original point.