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Comment by dennist | Hacker News Reader

I find a lot of the media (here in Japan anyways) call literally every automation by computers or machines AI. Example, there’s an automated gate that only opens if a scanner finds your body temperature is not too high. AI Gate. The other day was something related to automatic checkout at shops or something where it all boiled down to some computer reading QR codes

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Yea In Japan the AI hype (or fad) arrived with like 3-4 years of delay compared to the west. Thing is it works so well for startups to get funding, it's not just media but investors too. Worked for a startup which sold "AI" interact with customer by detecting human face (and age, gender etc) and having targeted conversation. Turns out it's just a facial recognition and replay of prerecorded voices. I felt really dumb when customers, investors & the CTO somehow were impressed by this basic functionality.

The other day I read an article about "uncovering tax fraud with algorithms and AI". The innovation: examining tax records not just from an individual perspective, but from a family perspective. Essentially a split-apply-combine. AI!

I read an article about a large firm of lawyers removing gendered language from their pro-forma documents. The article claimed they were going to use AI to achieve this. It's not even worth pointing out what is the obvious method for this task.

That reminds me how in South Africa the traffic lights are called robots.

A quite good story riffing off that: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/okorafor-kahiu_10_16/.

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