
A.I. is a big fat lie - theBashShell
https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/why-a-i-is-a-big-fat-lie?rebelltitem=8#rebelltitem8
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Veedrac
Incredibly, this was an even dumber post than I expected. For its length it's
hard to pinpoint any wrong argument made, because AFAICT it's mostly just a
semicoherent stream of unjustified assertions and associations, but it does
sometimes try, as per

> Oh yeah, and the second problem with the AI doomsday theory is that it's
> ludicrous. AI is so smart it's gonna kill everyone by accident? Really
> really stupid superintelligence? That sounds like a contradiction.

Bill Gates must be feeling like a right idiot now, huh?

Anyway, there was one line I did find entertaining in its inanity (the rest,
AFAICT, has zero value),

> Intelligence isn't a Platonic ideal that exists separately from humans,
> waiting to be discovered.

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zeofig
>mostly just a semicoherent stream of unjustified assertions and associations

Sounds a lot like AI

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ConcernedCoder
Please don't hijack my browser's back-button to inflate your viewing stats.

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goombastic
Alert: Crazy page hijacks your back button with page loads. Getting back here
was a pain. Why do websites do this?

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cookingrobot
Browsers shouldn’t allow it - they’re the ones in the position to fix this.

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ramgorur
I am actually quite surprised to see this kind of article on hn. Well, I am
even more surprised because it's getting upvotes.

 __Please get a copy of Russel-Norvig 's A.I. text and read at least some part
of it before clicking that link.

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zubairq
Very good article. AI is a branding exercise, and most people saying that we
have general purpose intelligence are not experts in it. Call it for what it
is, machine learning.

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m0zg
I now think of AI as basically deep learning based ML and nothing else. But
it's not entirely right to say it's not "intelligent". What is "intelligent"?
Is a mouse intelligent? It can't reason, speak, read, or write, yet I'd say it
is intelligent because it can respond to the environment in a way which on
average maximizes its survival. This is not that different to e.g. a RL system
responding to its environment in a way that will maximize reward. Then why
would a mouse be "intelligent", and RL system not "intelligent"?

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mindcrime
_I now think of AI as basically deep learning based ML and nothing else._

That strikes me as stunningly bizarre position to take. Why do you think that
way?

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indalo
Could you elaborate why you find it so bizarre so the gp and other readers can
find value in this thread? Or is this rhetorical?

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mindcrime
I find it bizarre because deep learning is only one (arguably fairly small)
subset of the entire field of AI. AI is a HUGE field, spanning an incredible
myriad of techniques and approaches.

Deep Learning may be the one receiving the most "hype" at the moment, but
there is - so far as I can tell - no sense in which anyone connected to AI
considers "AI" and "deep learning" synonymous.

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m0zg
Which "other", non DL areas of AI are in use at the moment? Which haven't yet
been completely blown out of the water by DL counterparts? NLU, translation,
sentiment analysis, image classification/segmentation, object detection,
instance segmentation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, sentence
generation, NER, the list goes on and on. In all of these ANNs completely
destroy previous approaches, it's not even close.

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mindcrime
I am not saying that DL isn't very successful and very popular. I'm just
saying that it isn't, all by itself, the entirety of the field of AI. I'm not
arguing anything about popularity and I definitely don't have usage stats,
since approximately nobody is going to publish exactly what stack they're
using if they get a competitive advantage from it.

But from a research perspective, it's not hard to find papers on arXiv showing
people continuing to research other aspects of AI.

It's also not hard to find papers from people suggesting that the DL train may
be running out of steam in the near future. See, for example,

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612768/we-
analyzed-16625-...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612768/we-
analyzed-16625-papers-to-figure-out-where-ai-is-headed-next/)

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bigwheeler
bigthink.com’s back button is a big fat lie

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Koshkin
> _The concept of "intelligence" is entirely subjective and intrinsically
> human._

...and the concept of “flying” is intrinsically avian.

