
What is AI? Your artificial intelligence questions, answered. – Vox - rbanffy
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/12/21/18126576/ai-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning-safety-alignment
======
ShannonAlther
This article leans too much on the current state of the art to extrapolate
towards possible futures, and it shouldn't. AI is dangerous, sure, but the
examples we're getting here are a DOTA2 team that lost to humans in a modified
version of the game, a blog post that doesn't adequately explain what the heck
was accomplished, and Atari bots that buttonmashed their way into exploits
that let them directly change registers in the game (all very cool but not
super relevant).

It kind of buries the lede that we're one or two technical achievements away
from the apocalypse (learning from unlabelled training sets, say) and instead
starts with "AI sentencing guidelines are biased against black defendants", as
if that exists in the same universe as Skynet IRL. IME the people who are even
worried about AI risks at all are overwhelmingly in the "what if it
disenfranchises minorities _even more?_ " camp, and only a tiny fraction are
concerned about having the atmosphere packed with graphite superconductors in
the next fifteen years. Any article like this should probably start off with
the assumption that the audience thinks AI is that cute thing in their iPhone
that dials the local pizza joint instead of your mother when you try to speak
to it. Whether or not AI will eventually let Donald Trump sustain himself
eternally on a golden throne as the God Emperor of America is a red herring
and needs to be deflected, like, immediately, or else people get on their own
hobby horse about how AI represents a turning point in the bendy straws
community. All the right notes are in here but they're at the end for some
reason.

