> Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Sam Harris, and many other leading AI researchers have sounded the alarm: ...
With all due respect (and as a theoretical physicist myself I have immense respect for Hawking at least), none of these are “leading AI researchers”. They are pundits, celebrities even. If you want to appeal to the authority of leading AI researchers, at least cite one actual leading AI researcher, or you come off as someone who has read too much tabloid.
I've given up on the term AI in popular media. When it's mentioned there is often interesting research or product development going on, but the term "AI" generally obfuscates it.
I almost want to give a pass to companies that use the term: these companies want to maximize profit, and if a nebulous marketing term helps them do so, it makes sense that they would.
What is more frustrating is that the press has totally bought into it. The point of a free press is to be critical, investigate, and poke holes in the marketing veneer. Sadly, the press seems to have adopted the term whole-heatedly without much thought, which in turn has added pressure to companies to market products as "AI".
Even worse, most tech journalists are actually smart and can spot the BS, they just choose not to.
I mean it honestly grinds my gears that people even use the marketing term of "AI" today when what we have is not even close to the actual thing. Intelligence is something that can freely think and make decisions on it's own. A complicated algorithm that can interpret data to do something automatically is not AI. It is confined by the code that it is given and that it is programmed to write for itself. It cannot pause and think "We'll what if I wanted to do more than this? How would I write my own code to do that?"
Computers are getting better, sure but they are improving at a slower and slower rate. Moore's law has been dead for years now. Maybe the singularity is indeed coming, but what if instead of the typical 20-50 year predictions, it's instead 2000 years away. What if the 20th century's exponential curve was really just a blip in the long term, and we're headed into centuries of slow linear growth.
The likelihood of this happening is low, but far above zero. I'm amazed no one is talking about it.