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Comment by locacorten | Hacker News Reader

I have been and continue to remain very skeptical about all this hoopla about AI.

Five years ago, I thought the hoopla about AI is just a fashion and it's all going to quickly pass.

Two years ago, I thought it's a bubble that will eventually burst.

At this point, I'm wondering whether what's happening is pure re-branding where we'll stop using the term CS and instead use the term AI.

If I think of AI as CS, I'm ok with it although I don't think graphics, comp. architecture, networking, and OS are AI. But if the rest of the world wants to call them AI, then let them.

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I think you are assuming that weak AI is being touted as strong AI.

What has happened is that methods have been discovered to do many very useful things using weak AI that have significant useful applications.

However, since it's weak AI the building blocks aren't that different from the AI we've had for decades. What makes it novel and worth its own academic specialization is that understanding how to combine and utilize those building blocks is not trivial.

I'd argue that it's currently a bit more of an art than a science, but surely it will eventually become a science.

I think that AI is just a rebranding of all automation, especially in the case where it's data driven automation. So I don't think it is something that will just pass, but will become a term for the interdisciplinary field of solving interdisciplinary problems with computers and data.

There are reasons to think some isn't hoopla, mostly that hardware is getting to brain level capabilities in processing power so you can do cool things you couldn't do before.

> hardware is getting to brain level capabilities in processing power

is it? not picking a fight, but i was under the impression that we're nowhere near. could you expand on this?

My understanding is that you can't really compare processing powers between brains and computers. They work differently and are better at different things.

Nobody is going to be better at raw number crunching than a computer, but there's also no computer that can recognise patterns as well as your brain can. At this point in time, the computer vs brains argument is very situational.

> My understanding is that you can't really compare processing powers between brains and computers.

I agree – I guess I papered over this and basically interpreted GP as saying "computers are getting fast enough to be able to emulate the brain's pattern recognition skills", which seems way too strong – hence my question.

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