Your description of "dumb AI" as being "just useful enough to maintain a flow of funding" reminds me of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedatry's description of the

Your description of "dumb AI" as being "just useful enough to maintain a flow of funding" reminds me of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedatry's description of the start of the Industrial Revolution [1]: > The specificity matters here because each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact. The steam engine is an excellent example of this problem. Early tinkering with the idea of using heat to create steam to power rotary motion – the core function of a steam-engine – go all the way back to Vitruvius (c. 80 BC -15 AD) and Heron of Alexandria (c. 10-70 AD). With the benefit of hindsight we can see they were tinkering with an importance principle but the devices they actually produced – the aeolipile – had no practical use – it’s fearsomely fuel inefficient, produces little power and has to be refilled with water (that then has to be heated again from room temperature to enable operation). He goes on to say that the very first "commercial" steam engine only happened to be commercially useful because of the particular situation in which it was invented: England had cut down most of their trees, but luckily had lots of coal. The engine wasn't quite useful enough to use to (say) pump water out of an iron mine, because it was so resource-hungry that it the cost of the fuel plus getting fuel to the engine would be too much. But it's just barely useful enough to pump water out of a coal mine, if you can provide it coal without having to transport it. And that gave it just enough of a commercial toe-hold to fund its optimization. It sounds like "dumb AI" of the 2000's may have performed a similar function; and we are, perhaps, on the edge of the "AI revolution", similar to the Industrial Revolution, where we reach a hockey-stick proliferation. EDIT: Fixed link [1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/comment-page-1/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...