Comment by AndrewKemendo
1 year ago
“open the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI)”
If ever there was a proof that “AI” doesn’t mean anything it’s this.
We’ve been living in the era of artificial intelligence since the 50s
People are waiting for the terminator to come in their house and dominate them before they actually agree that AI is a real thing
Basically, the colloquial definition of AI is “it can kill you based on its own desires and there’s nothing you can do about it”
> “it can kill you based on its own desires and there’s nothing you can do about it”
haha, that's an original take, but makes sense after Terminator and Hal
wondering if these movies have caused untold external consequences to humanity in its adoption of AI just to sell a few tickets
to make a parallel, anti-vaxxers did their damage and caused many lives to be lost, similarly these stories, which are no better, can make people have a bad start with AI and sabotage their futures, or stall the benefits of AI from everyone else
Genuinely I think that’s the case.
I have been in “AI” since 1998 when I was writing A* route planning for npcs in this new cool engine called Unreal.
The only thing that has been consistent in all these years is that nobody thinks it’s AI unless it’s literally like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the terminator. I mean I’m not even exaggerating, it’s so ridiculously predictable that the goalposts for AI move the second whatever that particular technology becomes ubiquitous
So for example, hog sift, surf etc. along with localization algorithms like slam type systems we’re so thoroughly in research when I started that they were considered a pillar of the field of AI. Now literally, no one would consider those AI because they do not use deep convolutional networks.
So just like Marvin Minsky said AI is a suitcase term that doesn’t fucking mean anything. As somebody who’s been doing it for so long I’m used to it but it’s still annoying.
So I’m just building the terminator and the counter terminator so we can move on.
> Tesler's Theorem (ca. 1970). My formulation of what others have since called the “AI Effect”. As commonly quoted: “Artificial Intelligence is whatever hasn't been done yet”. What I actually said was: “Intelligence is whatever machines haven't done yet”. Many people define humanity partly by our allegedly unique intelligence. Whatever a machine—or an animal—can do must (those people say) be something other than intelligence.
https://www.nomodes.com/larry-tesler-consulting/adages-and-c...
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>wondering if these movies have caused untold external consequences to humanity in its adoption of AI just to sell a few tickets
What are you saying? This isn't like when The Simpsons made fun of nuclear power and depicted it as doing impossible things. AGI is a hypothetical technology and we don't yet know what it could be capable of or even if it's feasible.
>to make a parallel, anti-vaxxers did their damage and caused many lives to be lost, similarly these stories, which are no better, can make people have a bad start with AI and sabotage their futures, or stall the benefits of AI from everyone else
Any idea can change a person's mind in one direction or another. Yours is an argument against the exchange of ideas in general. "Since hearing an idea could cause a person to $DO_BAD_THING, exchanging ideas (for example, by talking to people with $WRONG_OPINION, or by consuming fiction) is bad."
I thought "surely, when their lives will be at stake, people will do the prudent thing and trust doctors", but no, we were not that smart. Some ideas can be inflicting self-harm and continue getting support even in the face of grave consequences.
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Eh, when words lose functionality they either fall out of use or change meaning.
AI basically means things brains and computers both do, but this is only a useful term when brains do those things better than computers. Usually once computers definitively surpass brains we've moved on to just calling that computing.
Maybe that won't be the case and the term "AI" will either solidify as a broad category, or fall out of use, but it also might continue to refer to that-which-is-left-to-do, the things we're still better at than computers.