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Except: early AI has already succeeded. Things like Siri and Alexa work everyday for millions of people. Then there's also the hidden AIs we so ingrained in our

Except: early AI has already succeeded. Things like Siri and Alexa work everyday for millions of people. Then there's also the hidden AIs we so ingrained in our life we don't notice like Google's searching or even credit card fraud detection. The AI industry has a terrible problem: once we create an algorithm for something it's no longer AI, it's just an algorithm. It feels like there should be a corollary to Arthur C Clarke's famous law: Any sufficiently advanced algorithm is indistinguishable from intelligence.

MarkMMullin 9y ago
Excellent! Couldn't agree with you more
pharrlax 9y ago
Or "Any sufficiently understood tech buzzword becomes distinguishable as an incremental improvement on preexisting tech"
scarmig 9y ago
At this point, it's clear that the only version of AI that'll be acknowledged by the hard skeptics is "a system that thinks and works exactly like the best humans in history along every single individual axis, except a kabillion times better."
- woah 9y ago
  Well, that's what AI is always hyped as, by its proponents, and its detractors who want us to beware of a singularity where godlike machine intelligences take all the jobs and then turn the entire universe into paper clips. After being fed a diet of daily articles about the immense power of AI, it's pretty natural for someone to look at a program which gets your spoken song and movie requests right 75% of the time and say "that's not AI".
parenthephobia 9y ago
> Once we create an algorithm for something it's no longer AI, it's just an algorithm. Yes. If we create an algorithm, what intelligence is involved: real or artificial? Even using neural networks we're a long way from not having to give a high-level scaffold for an algorithm we've already decided upon. Present day neural networks are essentially a glorified spreadsheet "goal seek" function. An apparently smart image recognition "AI" has really only distilled the intelligence of the humans that classified the training data, and generalized it to other images in a manner devoid of real intelligence, which is why image recognizers can report that specially-prepared TV static is 99% certain to be a peacock.
mikelyons 9y ago
You're conflating voice-interface with a.i. they're not the same thing, they just appear to be the same thing to the untrained eye.
- tim333 9y ago
  A machine that could understand natural language used to be considered AI. It's more the definition of AI that shifts.

MarkMMullin 9y ago

Excellent! Couldn't agree with you more

pharrlax 9y ago

Or "Any sufficiently understood tech buzzword becomes distinguishable as an incremental improvement on preexisting tech"

scarmig 9y ago

At this point, it's clear that the only version of AI that'll be acknowledged by the hard skeptics is "a system that thinks and works exactly like the best humans in history along every single individual axis, except a kabillion times better."

woah 9y ago
Well, that's what AI is always hyped as, by its proponents, and its detractors who want us to beware of a singularity where godlike machine intelligences take all the jobs and then turn the entire universe into paper clips. After being fed a diet of daily articles about the immense power of AI, it's pretty natural for someone to look at a program which gets your spoken song and movie requests right 75% of the time and say "that's not AI".

parenthephobia 9y ago

> Once we create an algorithm for something it's no longer AI, it's just an algorithm. Yes. If we create an algorithm, what intelligence is involved: real or artificial? Even using neural networks we're a long way from not having to give a high-level scaffold for an algorithm we've already decided upon. Present day neural networks are essentially a glorified spreadsheet "goal seek" function. An apparently smart image recognition "AI" has really only distilled the intelligence of the humans that classified the training data, and generalized it to other images in a manner devoid of real intelligence, which is why image recognizers can report that specially-prepared TV static is 99% certain to be a peacock.

mikelyons 9y ago

You're conflating voice-interface with a.i. they're not the same thing, they just appear to be the same thing to the untrained eye.

tim333 9y ago
A machine that could understand natural language used to be considered AI. It's more the definition of AI that shifts.