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Who gave you the authority to decide on behalf of the world what the phrase AI means? You don’t get to arbitrarily redefine common words and phrases. Machine le

Who gave you the authority to decide on behalf of the world what the phrase AI means? You don’t get to arbitrarily redefine common words and phrases. Machine learning techniques are AI, as the term has been used in industry and academia for decades.

F-0X 8y ago
> Machine learning techniques are AI, as the term has been used in industry and academia for decades. As the poster said, most of them are just statistics; the term has been used in industry and academia for _centuries_. Predictive models based on accumulated data is just what statistics is applied to do. Calling it AI academically is a big stretch, calling it AI in industry is a marketing technique.
- esoterica 8y ago
  I repeat: > Who gave you the authority to decide on behalf of the world what the phrase AI means?
scottlocklin 8y ago
> Machine learning techniques are AI ... No, they absolutely are not: this is why we have a separate term and subject known as "machine learning." It is only pointy headed managers and regurgitators of public relations press releases (aka modern journalists) who refer to machine learning as "AI." Oh yeah, I guess I should include people who think the latter are some kind of authority on the topic. From the damn Miriam Webster dictionary of the English language: "artificial intelligence: : a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers 2 : the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior machine learning noun Definition of machine learning : the process by which a computer is able to improve its own performance (as in analyzing image files) by continuously incorporating new data into an existing statistical model"
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  There's a distinction to be drawn, certainly. If you walk into a university CS department, entry-level AI and ML are likely to be separate entries on the class roster, and you can make useful predictions about what you'll find in each course. But the complaint is that "computer intelligence" is the same sort of god-of-the-gaps concept as "human intelligence". Is tool use strictly human? Tool invention? Meta-tool use? Observational learning? Language? Coining new words? In the same way that the list of human-only behaviors has spent a century in retreat, the tasks which constitute "intelligent behavior" in computers are fundamentally undefined, and outside of the Turing Test they mostly consist of whatever problems appear at least 5-10 years out of reach. "ML techniques" is literally synonymous with AI, obviously. One is a group of algorithms, the other's an abstract concept. But a great many tasks currently handled under the label ML would have been widely accepted as "AI problems" very recently. A computer winning Jeopardy would have sounded like a shocking AI advance in 1997 when Deep Blue won, let alone in 1964 when the show debuted. In 2011, people scrambled to be fastest and most scathing in labelling it "not real intelligence" and mocking it for mistakes smaller than many human errors. The difference is usually semantic, and some responsibility for the sliding definition certainly lies with hype-happy journalists and over-optimistic AI researchers. (Had Watson won Jeopardy back in 1980, it would have roughly matched Minsky and Simon's predicted timelines.) But that distinction is increasingly used for the very specific equivocation which enables this article. "AI isn't doing that", meaning "it's ML instead", is conflated with "AI isn't doing that" meaning "that isn't happening". If AI doesn't take your job, but a deep-learning network developed by AI researchers does, it seems pretty fair to complain that the two terms aren't actually distinct.
firethief 8y ago
It's well established usage that "real AI" is whatever doesn't exist yet, and "today's AI" is actually just math
- Bartweiss 8y ago
  As a rather frustrated AI/ML professor once described it to me: "AI just means 'unsolved'. Everyone agrees we're working on AI problems as long as we're stuck, but once we're not they decide it was actually just statistics. I wonder if they'll ever notice it was always statistics?"
  - kthejoker2 8y ago
    "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." - Larry Tesler (sometimes quoted as Tesler's Theorem.)

F-0X 8y ago

> Machine learning techniques are AI, as the term has been used in industry and academia for decades. As the poster said, most of them are just statistics; the term has been used in industry and academia for _centuries_. Predictive models based on accumulated data is just what statistics is applied to do. Calling it AI academically is a big stretch, calling it AI in industry is a marketing technique.

esoterica 8y ago
I repeat: > Who gave you the authority to decide on behalf of the world what the phrase AI means?

scottlocklin 8y ago

> Machine learning techniques are AI ... No, they absolutely are not: this is why we have a separate term and subject known as "machine learning." It is only pointy headed managers and regurgitators of public relations press releases (aka modern journalists) who refer to machine learning as "AI." Oh yeah, I guess I should include people who think the latter are some kind of authority on the topic. From the damn Miriam Webster dictionary of the English language: "artificial intelligence: : a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers 2 : the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior machine learning noun Definition of machine learning : the process by which a computer is able to improve its own performance (as in analyzing image files) by continuously incorporating new data into an existing statistical model"

Bartweiss 8y ago
There's a distinction to be drawn, certainly. If you walk into a university CS department, entry-level AI and ML are likely to be separate entries on the class roster, and you can make useful predictions about what you'll find in each course. But the complaint is that "computer intelligence" is the same sort of god-of-the-gaps concept as "human intelligence". Is tool use strictly human? Tool invention? Meta-tool use? Observational learning? Language? Coining new words? In the same way that the list of human-only behaviors has spent a century in retreat, the tasks which constitute "intelligent behavior" in computers are fundamentally undefined, and outside of the Turing Test they mostly consist of whatever problems appear at least 5-10 years out of reach. "ML techniques" is literally synonymous with AI, obviously. One is a group of algorithms, the other's an abstract concept. But a great many tasks currently handled under the label ML would have been widely accepted as "AI problems" very recently. A computer winning Jeopardy would have sounded like a shocking AI advance in 1997 when Deep Blue won, let alone in 1964 when the show debuted. In 2011, people scrambled to be fastest and most scathing in labelling it "not real intelligence" and mocking it for mistakes smaller than many human errors. The difference is usually semantic, and some responsibility for the sliding definition certainly lies with hype-happy journalists and over-optimistic AI researchers. (Had Watson won Jeopardy back in 1980, it would have roughly matched Minsky and Simon's predicted timelines.) But that distinction is increasingly used for the very specific equivocation which enables this article. "AI isn't doing that", meaning "it's ML instead", is conflated with "AI isn't doing that" meaning "that isn't happening". If AI doesn't take your job, but a deep-learning network developed by AI researchers does, it seems pretty fair to complain that the two terms aren't actually distinct.

firethief 8y ago

It's well established usage that "real AI" is whatever doesn't exist yet, and "today's AI" is actually just math

Bartweiss 8y ago
As a rather frustrated AI/ML professor once described it to me: "AI just means 'unsolved'. Everyone agrees we're working on AI problems as long as we're stuck, but once we're not they decide it was actually just statistics. I wonder if they'll ever notice it was always statistics?"
- kthejoker2 8y ago
  "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." - Larry Tesler (sometimes quoted as Tesler's Theorem.)