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I’m a longtime AI skeptic who has been arguing passionately against the doom-sayers, many in my own family and in casual conversations with laymen, for several

I’m a longtime AI skeptic who has been arguing passionately against the doom-sayers, many in my own family and in casual conversations with laymen, for several years. I stand by this article I wrote which summarizes my views https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-artificial-intelligence-scam-is-imploding-34b156c3537e https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-artificial-intelligence-scam... The hype on AI was absolutely astonishing. I’m glad it’s finally coming back to reality.

dgb23 6y ago
The more I understand AI technology the less magic and powerful it seems. More traditional AI is often logic or algorithm based. This is powerful and expressive, but the "intelligence" part is as flexible as the specific implementation. This is intelligent in the sense of a design being intelligent, which can be attributed to the author of said design. Modern AI is often statistical. We have more data, so we can use that to generate a de-facto decision making database with statistically sound heuristics. These techniques are all useful and can be very impactful. But we have to understand them as tools. Your article agrees with this sentiment in a very entertaining way.
fxtentacle 6y ago
That article is well argued and I am inclined to agree. But then I noticed that we seem to strongly disagree on other topics. I find it fascinating that you can both see AI as what it truly is (a rebranding to solicit investment) yet still cheer for cryptocurrencies, which I personally believe to be not much more than a pyramid scheme to dupe those investors that buy in late. In my opinion, both AI and crypto are quite similar in the ways that they mislead investors by promising a golden future.
- seibelj 6y ago
  I am a longtime crypto guy, and totally 100% understand how you see the links. I have a very nuanced opinion on this, but it's difficult to explain briefly here. There are a lot of scams in crypto, but if you are a believer in Austrian economics and are not a fan of Keynesian theories, fiat currency, and the Federal Reserve, then Bitcoin / crypto is very attractive. But that's a separate discussion, unrelated to my opinion of AI and is primarily a philosophical issue. Cryptocurrency / blockchain is fascinating but we are not promising robots cleaning your house.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    I agree that AI has been way worse with the overpromising. But when I hear IPFS = interplanetary file system and then wee how poorly it performs in practice and that it's mostly used for illegal content, I cannot help but think that the crypto side also likes to oversell their practical utility. I believe I have yet to see an application where the Blockchain is truly a critical component. In most cases, it seems that people end up caching its data in sql to speed things up, meaning that they're working on their own private copy now.
- Vinceo 6y ago
  Why do you believe that cryptocurrencies are not much more than a pyramid scheme?
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    With the current transfers fees, it is difficult to do much apart from rarely moving large payments. For old-school currencies, that would be called speculation. If you now consider that both the mining difficulty grows over time and the mining reward drops, then you clearly have a system with a built-in advantage for early adopters. So people buy in, wait a bit, then exit at a higher price. But that only works as long as you have a large enough stream of newcomers. I'd be willing to consider it an investment if there was some sort of inherent value on the other side, so if buying cryptocurrency gave you a claim of ownership on something real. But the critical fundament of cryptocurrency is that it's unrelated to the real world and only controlled by its members. In other words, the value of a cryptocurrency is determined exclusively by what people believe it should be.
mathgenius 6y ago
I agree with your skepticism, while also acknowledging that A.I. in all its incarnations is a powerful tool. But the argument against AI, apart from "this is obviously limited", is much more subtle than what you are claiming in your article. (IMO, it comes down to quantum physics... Hopefully one day this will become obvious to everyone when we all have quantum computers.)

dgb23 6y ago

The more I understand AI technology the less magic and powerful it seems. More traditional AI is often logic or algorithm based. This is powerful and expressive, but the "intelligence" part is as flexible as the specific implementation. This is intelligent in the sense of a design being intelligent, which can be attributed to the author of said design. Modern AI is often statistical. We have more data, so we can use that to generate a de-facto decision making database with statistically sound heuristics. These techniques are all useful and can be very impactful. But we have to understand them as tools. Your article agrees with this sentiment in a very entertaining way.

fxtentacle 6y ago

That article is well argued and I am inclined to agree. But then I noticed that we seem to strongly disagree on other topics. I find it fascinating that you can both see AI as what it truly is (a rebranding to solicit investment) yet still cheer for cryptocurrencies, which I personally believe to be not much more than a pyramid scheme to dupe those investors that buy in late. In my opinion, both AI and crypto are quite similar in the ways that they mislead investors by promising a golden future.

seibelj 6y ago
I am a longtime crypto guy, and totally 100% understand how you see the links. I have a very nuanced opinion on this, but it's difficult to explain briefly here. There are a lot of scams in crypto, but if you are a believer in Austrian economics and are not a fan of Keynesian theories, fiat currency, and the Federal Reserve, then Bitcoin / crypto is very attractive. But that's a separate discussion, unrelated to my opinion of AI and is primarily a philosophical issue. Cryptocurrency / blockchain is fascinating but we are not promising robots cleaning your house.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  I agree that AI has been way worse with the overpromising. But when I hear IPFS = interplanetary file system and then wee how poorly it performs in practice and that it's mostly used for illegal content, I cannot help but think that the crypto side also likes to oversell their practical utility. I believe I have yet to see an application where the Blockchain is truly a critical component. In most cases, it seems that people end up caching its data in sql to speed things up, meaning that they're working on their own private copy now.
Vinceo 6y ago
Why do you believe that cryptocurrencies are not much more than a pyramid scheme?
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  With the current transfers fees, it is difficult to do much apart from rarely moving large payments. For old-school currencies, that would be called speculation. If you now consider that both the mining difficulty grows over time and the mining reward drops, then you clearly have a system with a built-in advantage for early adopters. So people buy in, wait a bit, then exit at a higher price. But that only works as long as you have a large enough stream of newcomers. I'd be willing to consider it an investment if there was some sort of inherent value on the other side, so if buying cryptocurrency gave you a claim of ownership on something real. But the critical fundament of cryptocurrency is that it's unrelated to the real world and only controlled by its members. In other words, the value of a cryptocurrency is determined exclusively by what people believe it should be.

mathgenius 6y ago

I agree with your skepticism, while also acknowledging that A.I. in all its incarnations is a powerful tool. But the argument against AI, apart from "this is obviously limited", is much more subtle than what you are claiming in your article. (IMO, it comes down to quantum physics... Hopefully one day this will become obvious to everyone when we all have quantum computers.)