Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.
Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them.
It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.
The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages.
And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!
Even if not, interesting AIs were at least interesting characters in a story sense (e.g. C3P0).
Now we're dealing with effectively the opposite - something that looks and behaves like a person but is decidedly not one. If you grew up with all the scifi about sympathetic (or at least charismatic) AI characters, this is probably sobering.
Depends on which sci-fi and/or literature you've been reading, I suppose?
Plenty written on these subjects where the future does not turn into some techno-utopia. And I've always found these takes on the subject much more compatible with the human condition as I've personally observed it in practice.
conversational interfaces we've had for decades. In fact this goes so far back that people thought ELIZA was sentient (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect), and not just laypersons but even the people working on it.
The actual lesson from this stuff is that linguistic interfaces fry people's brains, you could convince nerds that a brick was intelligent if you hooked it up to the voice of Scarlett Johansson. The perception that these systems are in any meaningful way intelligent, when they start getting stuck in a doom loop of fixing the same two bugs by reintroducing them in circles or give entire reviews for a music album that doesn't actually exist, is entirely in the head of the user.
It's annoying in my context but it's no wonder people jumping into open ended "conversations" with these things and up in dangerous feedback loops
Delusion.
Replace "AI" in that sentence with any rapidly evolving tech: social networks, smart homes, digital governments, hell - even online shopping.
The versions of any of those things a child would've read 20 years ago won't have anywhere near the complexities and unexpected downsides all those things ended up having in real life.
20 years ago, AI to (kid) me was a real life C3PO, or an npc in an open-world game that existed in that world with their own motivation and story independent of what you did. Or the stereotypical humanoid robot with consciousness like in the film "A.I.". No kid could've imagined vibe coding, running sub-agents, diffusion models, AI zombies, and all this other stuff we have today. Everything you imagined as a child is still possible, and depending on what exactly you read, is already here.
Yeah the UX is different than what anyone 20 years ago would've predicted, but how does this mean the "hate" make sense? That's not even 0.1% of the reason the typical anti-AI people are against AI.
I dont understand why the old definition of AI keeps being retconned.
AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him.
FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?
The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working towards.
I'm not sure why we allowed it, but they have been working on it for more than 50 years. My best guess is that they just kept insisting on it until people lost attention for an instant, and then did it again, and again.
UK an Germany practically invented the concept, and the US practically wrote the manual on how to make a welfare state.
Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.
[1] Legg, S., Hutter, M.: A collection of definitions of intelligence
[2] François Chollet, On the Measure of Intelligence
Imagine if we had social media during the flip from geocentrism.
There was never any old definition AI that limited it to such a tiny set of capabilities.
AI is controversial because the term intelligent is controversial and covers so much.
The term "AI" never meant bots in general.
It's true that in games bots were also called AI but only in a specific context and niche, and it is not what the whole conversation is about.
It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.
I agree with that, but I don't think anyone is moving the goalposts as you imply later in your post.
Machine learning wasn't unheard of 20 years ago, and statistical text engines were hitting consumer use (iPhone autocomplete probably what 2008-2010?)
It’s not general intelligence, but it’s a system that’s able to produce novel outputs from its inputs in pursuit of a goal. The fact that the goal is always externally-provided is more related to consciousness than intelligence.
Search algorithms used to be considered a part of AI research. The whole point of the field, from the Turing test onward, has been that mimicry is in some sense all you need. Maybe there's a coherent philosophical position where intelligence is defined as some intrinsic property possessed by conscious agents, but I find it remarkably hard to come up with a precise definition along those lines.
What period of history would you want your children to be born into, with zero control over where or who they’d be born to? Just a random person on the earth on a date you choose, what would be your choice?
I'm sorry but anyone who looks at Star Trek as a serious model for anything is at best naive. It's a space fantasy show whose Luxury Space Communism is little more than set dressing because it's a capitalist enterprise (pun intended come at me petaQs) made by capitalists for capitalist ends.
Likewise, expecting LLMs to serve anti-capitalist ends (eliminating the need for jobs among anyone but the capitalist class) when they are entirely controlled by capitalists is naive.
* according to the canon set by Gene Roddenberry. What actually plays out in the franchise is different, because human conflict makes for better entertainment.
Practically no one starves. The murder rate is down by crazy numbers. I'm not sure how much of a problem racism was at that time, but you wouldn't have had many chances to meet people from different haplogroups in any case.
The abundance created by industrial society is not distributed "evenly" or "fairly" but the baseline shift is insane.
We don’t get Star Trek post-scarcity by forcing everyone to do less, only by doing more. Creating more technology and creating (and consuming) more energy. Much more, near infinite amounts of it, that is what the replicator needs to create mass from energy.