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Comment by ChicagoDave

1 year ago

It’s still just a tool.

It does not reason. It has some add-on logic the simulates it.

We’re no closer to “AI” today than we were 20 years ago.

> The AI effect occurs when onlookers discount the behavior of an artificial intelligence program as not "real" intelligence.[1]

> Author Pamela McCorduck writes: "It's part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something—play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems—there was a chorus of critics to say, 'that's not thinking'."[2] Researcher Rodney Brooks complains: "Every time we figure out a piece of it, it stops being magical; we say, 'Oh, that's just a computation.'"[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

Personally I think “add-on logic that simulates reasoning” is a pretty good match for the “artificial” part of “artificial intelligence”.

I’ve been tryin out the alternative term “initiation intelligence” recently, mainly to work around the baggage that’s become attached to the term AI.

> We’re no closer to “AI” today than we were 20 years ago.

20 years ago we had barely figured out how to create superhuman agents to play chess. We have now created a new algorithm to solve Go, which is a much harder game.

We then created an algorithm (alpha zero) to teach itself to play any game, and which became the best chess player in the world in hours.

We next created a superhuman poker agent. Poker is even more complex than Go because it involves imperfect information and opponent modeling.

We then created a superhuman agent to play Diplomacy, which requires natural language and cooperation with other humans to reason about imperfect (hidden) information.

It's funny (and sad) when you can tell someone is old because they are still holding onto an epiphany or belief they solidified 20 years ago, but because those 20 years flew by, they never realized how outdated that belief became.

I catch this happening to myself more and more as I get older, where I realize something I confidently state as true might be totally out of date, because, oh wow, holy shit how did 10 years go by since I was last deep into that topic!?

  • > It's funny (and sad) when you can tell someone is old because they are still holding onto an epiphany or belief they solidified 20 years ago [...]

    So your sole argument in the discussion of one of the most important questions in the history of mankind is the age of the individual making a contribution to that discussion? Speaking of sad things...