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The problem with calling anything AI is that it's such a meaningless word in the context of computers. According to Wikipedia AI is "intelligence exhibited by m

The problem with calling anything AI is that it's such a meaningless word in the context of computers. According to Wikipedia AI is "intelligence exhibited by machines or software" and Merriam Webster define intelligence as "the ability to learn" so I'd say we hit AI long ago. I'd follow the meaning further but I hate arguing definitions. To put it another way, if we define a Scotsman as anyone born in Scotland and/or related to someone born in Scotland, we've essentially just defined a Scotsman as every organism ever to be alive on Earth. I have to imagine when the term first started to be used people imagined an AI as something more human than neural networks. Imagine HAL or any other hollywood perceived robot.

derefr 11y ago
I take the term AI to mean "a thing that people will actually acknowledge as being AI when it exists"—something that can only be defined retrospectively, but which still is a workable definition in that you can sort of predict what people will or won't want to have "wasted" the eventual definition of the term on. My personal bet is on people placing that line squarely on the divide between "Stoic Guru" and "Active Academy" UX models[1]. An AI is probably, to most people, an agent that continues to think and learn when it is not being interacted with—by surfing the internet, maybe—such that it can generate novel outputs, and revise its own previous beliefs, with no user-visible step that would be perceived as "re-training." Something that will come to you with thoughts it has had that you'll find relevant, that were inspired by new data the agent has acquired not derived from your input. A simple example that people would probably think of as "AI" (and which people wouldn't accept as a UX paradigm unless it was presented to them through an agent-based interface) would be a spam filter like GMail's that learns from the classifications of everyone who uses it, that would go back and reclassify messages that it now had a more refined opinion on. Nobody would want a dumb algorithm to take emails that "were" in their inbox and move them over into their spam folder—that's destructive!—but they'd accept a (virtual) secretary using their judgement to do so. Thus, AI. [1] https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/category/active-academy/ https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/category/active-academ...
- jpatokal 11y ago
  I think you just described Google Now: https://www.google.com.au/landing/now/ https://www.google.com.au/landing/now/
animal531 11y ago
A while ago AI hadn't been complex and deep enough to warrant categories (especially to the layman), so it was just a general moniker put on everything from a smart piece of code with some adaptability all the way through to singularity level computer intelligence (as we'd imagine it). Now we're beginning to realise that there are vast ranges of categories out there, but it will take some time for consensus use to form (especially since a lot of them overlap into what we perceive as general intelligence, which we so far have had difficulty in defining and pinning down)
s_kilk 11y ago
The popular understanding of "AI" should really be rebranded as "Synthetic Thought"

derefr 11y ago

I take the term AI to mean "a thing that people will actually acknowledge as being AI when it exists"—something that can only be defined retrospectively, but which still is a workable definition in that you can sort of predict what people will or won't want to have "wasted" the eventual definition of the term on. My personal bet is on people placing that line squarely on the divide between "Stoic Guru" and "Active Academy" UX models[1]. An AI is probably, to most people, an agent that continues to think and learn when it is not being interacted with—by surfing the internet, maybe—such that it can generate novel outputs, and revise its own previous beliefs, with no user-visible step that would be perceived as "re-training." Something that will come to you with thoughts it has had that you'll find relevant, that were inspired by new data the agent has acquired not derived from your input. A simple example that people would probably think of as "AI" (and which people wouldn't accept as a UX paradigm unless it was presented to them through an agent-based interface) would be a spam filter like GMail's that learns from the classifications of everyone who uses it, that would go back and reclassify messages that it now had a more refined opinion on. Nobody would want a dumb algorithm to take emails that "were" in their inbox and move them over into their spam folder—that's destructive!—but they'd accept a (virtual) secretary using their judgement to do so. Thus, AI. [1] https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/category/active-academy/ https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/category/active-academ...

jpatokal 11y ago
I think you just described Google Now: https://www.google.com.au/landing/now/ https://www.google.com.au/landing/now/

animal531 11y ago

A while ago AI hadn't been complex and deep enough to warrant categories (especially to the layman), so it was just a general moniker put on everything from a smart piece of code with some adaptability all the way through to singularity level computer intelligence (as we'd imagine it). Now we're beginning to realise that there are vast ranges of categories out there, but it will take some time for consensus use to form (especially since a lot of them overlap into what we perceive as general intelligence, which we so far have had difficulty in defining and pinning down)

s_kilk 11y ago

The popular understanding of "AI" should really be rebranded as "Synthetic Thought"