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Perhaps without intending to, you've cited a pretty appropriate example of overconfident pessimism. Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus is most responsible for this port
by glenstein 3y ago
Perhaps without intending to, you've cited a pretty appropriate example of overconfident pessimism. Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus is most responsible for this portrayal of AI research in the '50s and '60s. He made a career of insisting that advances in AI would never come to pass, famously predicting that computers couldn't become good at chess because it required "insight", and routinely listing off what he believed were uniquely human qualities that couldn't be embodied in computers, always in the form of underdefined terms such as intuition, insight, and other such terms.
Many of the things AI does now are exactly the type of things that doomsayers explicitly predicted would never happen, because they extrapolated from limited progress in the short term to absolute declarations over the infinite timeline of the future.
There's a difference between the outer limits of theoretical possibility on the one hand, and instant results over the span of a couple new cycles, and it's unfortunate that these get conflated.
- RandomLensman 3y agoThere is no doubt that some leading AI proponents in the 1960s were overconfident.
- ambrozk 3y agoThis is exactly the point. The pessimists get the pedantic thrill of pointing out that, 60 years ago, some proponents were overconfident. But they neglect to notice the larger picture, which is one of extraordinary progress. They'll be sitting in the passenger seat of a self-driving car, arranging their travel itinerary with a chatbot fluent in English and 60 other languages, and smugly commenting on HackerNews about how "AI pessimists got it right in the 60s."
- RandomLensman 3y agoLots of progress in some areas, very little in others. Neither the pessimists nor the optimists got it right. (Btw., a really hardened pessimist might even say your example is mostly things that were doable when there were not many computers around at all... taxi driver to drive you, a secretary to book a flight, meet in a club to discuss things, ...)
- ambrozk 3y agoTo me, if artificial intelligence means anything, it means automating mundane tasks -- most of which humans can accomplish already. If someone tells me they're an AI pessimist because they think automating tasks like "converse intelligently about nearly any subject at length" and "drive my car anywhere while I sleep in the back" isn't an impressive AI achievement, then I think our disagreement pertains to our ambitions for the field, and lies outside the realm of the technical.