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Historically, all kinds of words meant all kinds of different things than what they do now. A word means what people think it means. It is a symbol used to comm

Historically, all kinds of words meant all kinds of different things than what they do now. A word means what people think it means. It is a symbol used to communicate an idea. We can wish that prescriptivist interpretations applied, but one thing we can’t seem to do is make that the reality.

oddlyaromatic 8y ago
Normally I'd agree with this sentiment: language changes constantly, usage is king. However we're in an era where people (often in the course of marketing themselves or a product) intentionally move the goalposts of word meanings in a way that's generally unhelpful to users of that language. So we describe there is something called X that sounds very impressive and powerful. And there is something else kind of like the existing idea we called X, but it's more mundane ... it's close enough that salespeople can get away with calling it that, so they do, and the definition of X is now hopelessly muddled. I don't know what to do about it, but this does not strike me as being the same as the natural evolution of word meanings over time. I guess really it is still one form of that. But maybe it's one that as a society we should be more careful of - you can't, for example, call one medication by the name of another for marketing reasons. Maybe AI is not the worst example. But with most buzzwords that are not legally protected, they just get marketed into meaninglessness in a way that harms non-expert consumers.
throwaway84742 8y ago
Nevertheless, I maintain that you can’t, in all honesty, call the ML techniques we employ today “intelligence”. They are little more than function approximation. Qualitatively this is a technique we had for decades, it’s just that now we can approximate functions that are far more complex. A qualitatively different thing that I’d have no problem calling “intelligence” would also supplement perceptual and transducer stuff we have now with higher level cognition and knowledge representation. But at the moment all of that is so far out of scope that the unit of bogosity is named after the last guy who tried to do something about those higher level issues (Doug Lenat) and everybody else is afraid to touch them with a 10 foot pole.

oddlyaromatic 8y ago

Normally I'd agree with this sentiment: language changes constantly, usage is king. However we're in an era where people (often in the course of marketing themselves or a product) intentionally move the goalposts of word meanings in a way that's generally unhelpful to users of that language. So we describe there is something called X that sounds very impressive and powerful. And there is something else kind of like the existing idea we called X, but it's more mundane ... it's close enough that salespeople can get away with calling it that, so they do, and the definition of X is now hopelessly muddled. I don't know what to do about it, but this does not strike me as being the same as the natural evolution of word meanings over time. I guess really it is still one form of that. But maybe it's one that as a society we should be more careful of - you can't, for example, call one medication by the name of another for marketing reasons. Maybe AI is not the worst example. But with most buzzwords that are not legally protected, they just get marketed into meaninglessness in a way that harms non-expert consumers.

throwaway84742 8y ago

Nevertheless, I maintain that you can’t, in all honesty, call the ML techniques we employ today “intelligence”. They are little more than function approximation. Qualitatively this is a technique we had for decades, it’s just that now we can approximate functions that are far more complex. A qualitatively different thing that I’d have no problem calling “intelligence” would also supplement perceptual and transducer stuff we have now with higher level cognition and knowledge representation. But at the moment all of that is so far out of scope that the unit of bogosity is named after the last guy who tried to do something about those higher level issues (Doug Lenat) and everybody else is afraid to touch them with a 10 foot pole.