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> I bet if you'd interview the average world-citizen they'd not be so convinced.

I bet if you interview the average AI researcher they'd not be convinced. All the progress we've seen can be summed up as doing dumb things quickly. Obviously that's a bit reductive and some of the dumb things are less dumb than they were before but it's hard to deny how much progress depends on our ever increasing ability to do mechanical things faster than ever before. "Dumb things quickly" is also closer to the truth about the current (and forseeable future) state of AI than all the pop-culture bullshit about super intelligence and robots taking over.

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> All the progress we've seen can be summed up as doing dumb things quickly.

Multiplying large numbers, playing chess well, and proving mathematical theorems were widely believed to necessarily require intelligence, up until when a machine could do it.

Doing those tasks intuitively requires intelligence - and has still not been done. Doing these tasks brute force by exhausting the problem problem space never required 'intellegence', only computational power.

> doing dumb things quickly

AlphaGo's policy (what moves should I look into) and value (how good is this board position) networks aren't dumb-but-fast. The rollouts are though.

Recent image successes (classifying images) aren't dumb-but-fast.

You can still trick the best image classification techniques with objects that to the human mind are clearly not what the machine says they are. Machines do not reason in the way that humans do. They don't have a concept of a self that exists in space-time. Humans can make inferences about images precisely because they have an a priori understanding of space-time.

You will always find that those who have faith in strong AI also have faith in a reductionist approach to human intellect. That is, they are behaviorists and neuroscientists and not philosophers and poets.

What makes great art is not the notes that make up the melody but expression of the human condition.

Machines do not make art. They make meaningless objects.

This is something I want to believe, but history shows us that scientific progress often comes with the loss of traditional, magical views of the Self and of the universe which are taken for granted: Newton "unweaved the rainbow", Darwin showed us that we are quite close to monkeys, and so on. If AI reaches a point where it can mimic great art, it will be a shock to humanity similar to when we discovered that humans are only a minuscule part of time and space.

I'd argue that the classifying images successes do indeed qualify as dumb but fast. Not to say it was not a difficult problem to teach a computer how to solve, but if you ask a 5 year old to pick out all the pictures that contain chairs they could definitely do it. Vision & identifying things is a problem that even very dumb humans can easily solve, but all of us do it relatively slowly.

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