When we talk about AI these days, we're usually talking about large language models. To an LLM, the only reality it knows is data, and to be more specific, text data. Even when it looks at a photo, it's translating that photo into text data that it can understand through a vision encoder.
But for humans, text is a small part of how we experience reality. Until the last few hundred years, text played almost no role in the average person's life. Most of human experience has been done through the senses or verbal communication, not through any sort of written text. Even if most modern humans do read, it is not the primary way that we experience our lives.
This shows a fundamental difference between how humans and AI experience reality, and it doesn't stop there. This difference is at the center of why AI cannot replace humans in the workplace, including those working in tech. I would like to go into further detail about this point in this article.
The perspective difference: Life & Death
The clearest place to see the difference in perspective is mortality. Humans can die. LLMs can't. Our human ancestors have evolved over millions of years to be better at surviving. It is something that we have become very good at, and we're only getting better. We sense danger and we curb risk taking, but an LLM doesn't view those same risks. An advanced LLM understands that it can be reset or have its memory wiped, but not disappear forever.
