I'd say advancement in mathematics, computer science, and heck, even art is far from "pointless". Why does it feel like goalposts get moved everytime there is a significant progress in AI?
Why does it feel like people think this is a useful or interesting whine? OK you brute-force solved tic-tac-toe, you built an AI. Congratulations, everyone recognises the dawn of Artificial Intelligence - and truly, enumerating all states of tic-tac-toe is all we ever dreamed of, all we could want, it's really all there is to intelligence. The term "AI" will never ever be used to mean anything else.
The term "AI" means (solving the first problem that was ever suggested to be AI decades ago) - how is that a better state of the world? What has anyone gained from "not moving the goalpoasts"?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Is this just some performative grousing or do you really think what has been developed to date is “artificial intelligence”?
These comments all conveniently fail to define their author’s goalposts that apparently have been reached or surpassed. What were yours?
Notice how nobody is talking about the Turing Test anymore now that it's either already been passed or is very damn close? We can argue back and forth about whether the real stupidity was the earlier expectation that the Turing Test was a useful threshold for AI, but it's impossible to claim that it wasn't a somewhat common and well-known one, so that goalpost really has been moved in a very dramatic way (or rather, removed altogether and replaced with nothing in particular other than a vague "I'll know it when I see it", in most cases).
But it is also true that numerous ground techniques are issue of the field of AI and generally called AI as they come out. It makes for good press. And that too was silly.
For actually already done: Actually believable chat-bots? Summarizers and question answerers? Generative text and graphics actually usable for generation of text, graphics and (mostly) photo-realistic renderings? Architecture brainstorming? (And logos, etc.) Kinda working self-driving cars? New Go playing strategies? A super-human Go champion? AI is on a roll these days.
That's not counting the more proprietary and discreet applications being already used all over the place. I fully expect there are already several.
It's like arguing that when a child rides a bike with stabilisers that they have "learned to ride a bike" and then complaining anytime someone suggests the child learns to ride without stabilisers, because they "already learned to ride a bike" and now that's moving the goalposts - but you still want them to learn without stabilisers, presumably, you're just complaining about the term used to describe it, for ... apparently no reason or benefit whatsoever?
- Passing the Turing test (for some measure of that) is a huge achievement - Poopoo-ing it is unuseful.
- Moving the bar from chat-bot Turing test to wwwaaayyy over there at super-human intelligence is unuseful. There are lots of valuable steps in between.
- There are many valuable steps before super-human intelligence.
- Most humans are nowhere near super-human intelligence. They are still "intelligent" enough for significant effects on the world as well as day-to-day grind.
- You can get plenty of sci-fi-level results without super-human intelligence
- We have already achieved AGI - Artificial General Intelligence because plenty of humans operate "just fine" in the world with bog-standard intelligence and for the ones limited to a keyboard roughly equivalently to an LLM-based chatbot. Top of the line AGI OR top of the line intelligence is not necessary to massively change the world.
- Incremental and bonus goals are a great thing! You are right!
- Many humans will fight hard to reserve the term intelligence to wet stuff. That's unuseful.
- Just because "it's done" doesn't mean all of a sudden that Turing test was not a good test.
About the only point of arguing it is if you personally developed Deep Blue to beat Gary Kasparov at chess, when "beating a human grandmaster at chess" would definitely(tm) be AI, and now you feel hacked off that your personal or team recognition has been trivialised by moving goalposts and you've missed out on fame and a place in history. But I'm thinking it can't possibly be that all the people rambling about moving goalposts could be in that position and not mention it.