Famous astrophysicist dismisses AI's like ChatGPT, calling them 'glorified tape recorders'

CNN's Fareed Zakaria has sat down with astrophysicist Michio Kaku for an interview where he threw a wet blanket on the erupting fire of artificial intelligence (AI).

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has calmed the rampant fears that artificial intelligence-powered chatbots are going to take over the world, either through replacing jobs or reaching a point of complexity where they are conscious and put into a physical robotic.

Kaku described these AI-powered systems, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, as "glorified tape recorders," saying that these systems simply take "snippets of what's on the web created by a human, splices them together and passes it off as if it created these things," he said. "And people are saying, 'Oh my God, it's a human, it's humanlike.'"

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Physicist Michio Kaku

Additionally, Kaku said that these systems, or chatbots are unable to determine what is true and what is false. Adding that humans are still needed to determine the facts from the fallacies, "That has to be put in by a human." The theoretical physicist explained that humans are currently in the second stage of computation evolution, with the first stage being analog, which required "sticks, stones, levers, gears, pulleys, string."

The second stage was the switch to electricity-powered transistors that eventually became microchips, birthing the world we know now as the digital landscape. The next stage is quantum computing, or computational processes that are carried out on particles and electrons. Kaku explains that this would be a shift away from the typical binary systems we know today, and computing would be closer to how Mother Nature operates.

"Mother Nature would laugh at us because Mother Nature does not use zeros and ones," Kaku said. "Mother Nature computes on electrons, electron waves, waves that create molecules. And that's why we're now entering stage three."