This whole post can be (unintentionally) TL;DRed by a single Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
The phenomenon of people discounting significant advances as "not AI" is not new. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten old yet.
The phenomenon of people discounting significant advances as "not AI" is not new. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten old yet.
It hasn't gotten old because people keep calling non-AI AI. I have so far refrained from correcting people because I see it like the word "hacker", which on Hacker News is widely understood in its correct meaning, but is commonly used to refer to computer criminals. I've given up long ago on correcting people to use the word "crackers" rather than "hackers". But since it has been brought up...
Artificial Intelligence refers to something that behaves intelligently and can adapt to new situations. I don't think human brains are magic or divine (I was surprised to learn this is not a universal opinion), so in that sense we're all "just a computation". In that sense the simplest pocket calculator is a thinking machine since it can take an almost infinite number of inputs and respond to it logically. But everyone with (artificial) intelligence understands that this is not what is meant by artificial intelligence.
The article that you link claims that every major advance is referred to as "just a computation", but I doubt that people will claim AI is "just a computation" once a computer learns to speak and can have a real conversation at the level of a 3 year old or something.
You'd be surprised. Here's part of just such a conversation for a couple of years ago; I've always thought "hacker" without qualifiers meant "person who can code"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9790316
Other terms commonly used here with wildly different meanings being applied include "liberal", "feminism" and "capitalism". Screaming matches abound... :)
It's obviously speculative, but I'm of the belief that AGI will never exist the way fanciful minds imagine it. Rather AI will evolve slowly, and systems will incorporate small advances one by one until one day we don't really care to distinguish between AI and AGI. It will literally just be a collection of capabilities ("just a computation") that are well understood and have lost all semblance of magic.
Discounting AI advances is nothing new, but upselling them is at least as old, as well.
My own way to look at AI winters is as triumph of Scruffy pragmatism over Neat delusions. Intelligence is unimaginably complicated, there is no reason to believe that silver bullet algorithms even exist, let alone the probability that the latest fad is it.