The best description I've ever heard of AI is the following. I heard this in the 80s, and it has held up since:
AI is magic.
1: You see a magic trick. You are amazed by the magic.
2: You are shown how the trick works. You are impressed by the technique.
3: You learn how to perform the trick. Now it's not magic, it's sleight-of-hand, or mirrors, or misdirection.
This is why "AI" is always bullshit: once you understand it, it's not AI any more, it's something else.
Some things that used to be AI but aren't any more:
- production systems
- expert systems
- semantic networks
- theorem provers
- Bayesian inference
- putting parentheses around data and calling it "knowledge"
- computational linguistics
- genetic algorithms
- machine translation
@jwz @ErikJonker If you replace „AI“ with „technology“, then the whole point of the argument becomes moot. The argument is not that „technology is bullshit“. The argument is that people‘s associations and expectations that come with the term „Intelligence“ are bullshit. It‘s a misnomer. Simply avoid calling it „AI“ and you’re fine.
@jwz I'm reminded of a cartoon that I can no longer locate - the name of the field depends on the audience.
To fellow academics, it's deep learning.
To industry, it's machine learning
To investors, it's AI
@jwz I'm not sure if that's intended for me, but my point is that recognizing the brilliance of those tricks which compose your daily life is hardly opposed to understanding how they work or their limitations.
Magnetrons feel like magic. Even if you know how they work. They're neat & convenient.
We're engraving electrical channels in silicon using light (invisible light, even, for UV-based processes) to compute & display cat pictures on diode matrices.
@jwz As someone who got into the field during the “AI Winter” of the early 2000s.. what makes sad about most of what’s been going on for the last decade is that it completely loses the inquiry into and analysis of why the tricks work and if they can actually advance our understanding of cognition.
Though I suppose the response to the latest crop of LLMs does tell us a lot about human cognition on a macros scale… But we already knew these things via the Trump presidency I think.
@jwz this is what will be said about human "intelligence" once we figure out how the brain works.
Bracing for incoming existential crisis😂
reminded of one of my officemates in grad school, employed by the AI-research group doing The Medical Expert System That Shall Not Be Named (*), relaying to me the following conversation:
PI: "So, you need to revert this."
Andy: "But it fixes [list of bugs]. It's doing the right thing now."
PI: "It's correct, but it's SLOW."
(*) stanford, 1980s, there was only the one, and god did they milk the shit out of it for every last LPU.
Yeah, that's pretty much the schedule. It seems to me the issue is that the tricks are getting closer and closer to being what humans appear to do, and the 'how the trick works' might be getting closer and closer to the fundamental "mystery" of self/consciousness.
Maybe all of our rich internal experience and creativity is [just] similar pattern matching?
The work of an LLM sounds a lot like the Multiple Drafts model of consciousness to me.
@jwz @markdennehy I’d buy that NFT.
*for, like, five bucks or something- I’m not nuts
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