Behold! AI!
Plucking chickens, loose interpretations of man, and sitting in the dirt with the Cynics.
Anyone who knows me knows when philosophy gets flowing, one of my least favorite philosophers is Plato. Maybe not as much as I dislike Ayn Rand, but enough that Diogenes has a soft spot in my heart. The story goes that Plato and his Academy were discussing how to define "man" and came up with "a featherless biped." Diogenes, upon hearing of this, plucked a chicken, and tossed it, naked of all feathers into the Academy shouting "Behold! A man!" Plato, and his cohorts, had to amend their definition to fit a new category, appending "with broad, flat nails" to the description.
The Naked Chicken
These days, the question of machine, and man, and intelligence is getting blurred further and further. We find ourselves in Plato's Academy, scratching our heads over the latest plucked chicken. Instead of marble pillars, we're surrounded by data centers, which have their own problems, (pin in that for a later date), asking ourselves if this definition of "man" escapes the Naked Chicken Problem.
The milestones that machine learning has made over my lifetime (41 years and counting, yikes!) is incredible. It used to be that "machines can't outwit humans in chess" but then Deep Blue happened. Then "Well, they can't reason and context, or write creatively" but then we hit the generative LLM, and here we are, talking with a thing that reads and writes just like a person.
We're constantly looking at a plucked chicken, wondering when the next bare fowl will drop and shatter our illusion of "man."
Getting Dirty With Diogenes
The Cynic was great at pulling back the curtain on bad definitions. When we examine the future of AI, we can analyze and see potential. We're not concerned with Plato's Academy and their loose interpretation of man. We're plucking chickens, seeing what's wrong with the definition, and consistently improving our grasp on the absurdity of the question itself.
And that is exactly why the local sandbox is where the real fun happens. When you bring a model down onto your own hardware, you stop caring about Plato's definition game entirely. You don’t need to stress over whether the file on your solid-state drive is "thinking," or if it has crossed some arbitrary academic threshold into true consciousness.
You already know what it is: a beautifully engineered, featherless biped of pure mathematics. By pulling it out of the grand ivory towers and onto your own desk, you accept the absurdity at face value.
You just sit in the dirt with the Cynic, hand the plucked chicken a crayon, and watch what it draws.