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I've found that everything that works stops being called AI. Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI. OCR, computer algebra systems, voice r
by llm_trw 2y ago
I've found that everything that works stops being called AI.
Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI.
OCR, computer algebra systems, voice recognition, checkers, machine translation, go, natural language search.
All solved, all not AI any more yet all were AI before they got solved by AI researchers.
There's even a name for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?utm_source=perplexity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?utm_source=perplex...
- AlienRobot 2y agoThat's a very interesting phenomenon!
- riku_iki 2y ago> Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI. logic programming is not directly linked to SQL, and has its own AI term now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOFAI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOFAI.
- llm_trw 2y agoThe original SQL was essentially Prolog restricted to relational algebra and tuple relational calculus. SQL as is happened when a lot of cruft was added to the mathematical core.
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- analog31 2y agoOn an amusing note, I've read something similar: Everything that works stops being called philosophy. Science and math being the two familiar examples.
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- nine_k 2y agoI won't say that things like stoicism or humanism never worked. But they never got to the level of strict logical or experimental verifiability. Physics may be hard science, but the very notion of hard science, hypotheses, demand to replicate, demand to be able to falsify, etc, are all philosophy.
- benterix 2y agoThere is a reason for that. People who inquired into the actual functioning of the world used to be called philosophers. That's why so many foundations of mathematics actually come from philosophers. The split happened around the 17th century. Newton still called his monumental work "Natural Philosophy", not "Physics".
- benrutter 2y agoJust in case anyone's curious, this is from Bertrand Russell's "the history of philosophy". > As soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science. I'm not actually sure I agree with it, especially in light of less provable schools of science like string theory or some branches of economics, but it's a great idea.
- xenospn 2y agoIs this why almost all CompSci PhDs are actually “doctor of philosophy”?
- lostphilosopher 2y agoPhD itself is an abbreviation for "Doctor of Philosophy." The title is more about the original Greek "lover of wisdom" than about the modern academic discipline of philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy Doctor is similar - in the US, when someone says "Doctor" they usually mean "Medical Doctor" but "Doctor" just comes from the Greek "teacher" / "scholar" which is more broad and the title can still be used officially and correctly for PhDs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_(title) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_(title)
- sapphicsnail 2y agoJust a little correction. Doctor is Latin and roughly means "someone who has learned a lot." Science also originally referred to knowledge. What we think of as "science" used to be called the natural sciences. Sometimes people get confused because I have a B.S. in Classics because science has lost that broader meaning.
- tovej 2y agoIt is still called natural science, but it used to be called natural philosophy. And it is interesting, as you say, that when it comes to Bachelor/Master/Doctor of Science/Art/Philosophy (even professor), these are all titles formed from arbitrary terms that have been enshrined by the institutions that give people these titles.
- winwang 2y agoIs the contrapositive of this "philsophers (are those who) do stuff which don't work"? :P
- js8 2y agoThis is also true for consciousness or sentience. No matter how surprising abilities of non-human beings (and computer agents), it is something mysterious that only humans do.
- OJFord 2y agoWe've kind of done it in reverse with AI though - 'chatbots' have been universally shit for ages, and now we have good ones, but they're 'AI'.
- digging 2y agoChatbot is the form factor; LLMs are what is being called AI. SmarterChild wasn't an LLM.
- bronco21016 2y agoThere's a throwback. I hear the dial up modem now!
- eth0up 2y agoI think when things get really good, which I've no doubt will happen, we'll call it SI; Synthetic Intelligence But it may be a while.
- llm_trw 2y agoBert is already not an LLM and the vector embedding it generates are not AI. It is also first general solution for natural language search anyone has come up with. We call them vector databases. Again I'd wager this is because they actually work.
- surprisetalk 2y agoTotally agree! [1] https://taylor.town/synthetic-intelligence https://taylor.town/synthetic-intelligence
- eth0up 2y agoThat pretty much expounds and articulates my thoughts on that subject. Just don't use the word Champaign anywhere near a Miller Highlife in France. I think they're digging up old guillotines for that. Edit: Your Dijkstra quote may be missing an "is": ..the question whether machines can think is as relevant
- iterateoften 2y agoI remember the original Lisp manual describes it as a symbolic language for “AI”
- akomtu 2y agoPeople innately believe that intelligence isn't an algorithm. When a complex problem presents itself for the first time, people think "oh, this must be so complex that no algorithm can solve it, only AI," and when an algorithmic solution is found, people realise that the problem isn't that complex. Indeed, if AI was an algorithm, imagine what would it feel like to be like one: at every step of your thinking process you are dragged by the iron hand of the algorithm, you have no agency in decision making, for every step is pre-determined already, and you're left the role of an observer. The algorithm leaves no room for intelligence.
- pas 2y agoit mostly depends on one's definition of an algorithm. our brain is mostly scatter-gather with fuzzy pattern matching that loops back on itself. which is a nice loop, inputs feeding in, found patterns producing outputs and then it echoes back for some learning. but of course most of it is noise, filtered out, most of the output is also just routine, most of the learning happens early when there's a big difference between the "echo" and the following inputs. it's a huge self-referential state-machine. of course running it feels normal, because we have an internal model of ourselves, we ran it too, and if things are going as usual, it's giving the usual output. (and when the "baseline" is out of whack then even we have the psychopathologies.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rxXoiQyQVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rxXoiQyQVc
- mdavidn 2y agoIs that not the human experience? I have no “agency” over the next thought to pop into my head. I “feel” like I can choose where to focus attention, but that too is a predictable outcome arising from the integration of my embryology, memories, and recently reinforced behaviors. “I” am merely an observer of my own mental state. But that is an uncomfortable idea for most people.
- gbalduzzi 2y agoWhile technically true, the difference is that we don't know in details how that process works and we can't predict it. There is not much of a difference in considering it deterministic or not, because we can't determine it.
- fsndz 2y agoExactly what I wrote recently: "The "AI effect" is behind some of the current confusion. As John McCarthy, AI pioneer who coined the term "artificial intelligence," once said: "As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore." This is why we often hear that AI is "far from existing." This led to the formulation of the Tesler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."" https://www.lycee.ai/blog/there-are-indeed-artificial-intelligences https://www.lycee.ai/blog/there-are-indeed-artificial-intell...
- beryilma 2y ago> As soon as it works, no one calls it AI anymore. So, what are good examples of some things that we used to call AI, which we don't call AI anymore because they work? All the examples that come to my mind (recommendation engines, etc.) do not have any real societal benefits.
- delecti 2y agoSome examples are navigation algorithms, machine learning, neural networks, fuzzy logic, or computer vision. I personally learned several of those in a "Artificial Intelligence" CS course ~15 years ago, but most people would never think to call Google Maps, a smart thermostat learning their habits, or their doorbell camera recognizing faces "AI". It's only recently with generative AI that you see any examples of the opposite, people outside the field calling LLMs or image generation "AI".
- matsemann 2y agoOther examples are even more classical. Like state search algorithms. Alfa-beta pruning is no longer intelligence, just an algorithm.
- janalsncm 2y agoChess engines. People once believed that in order for a computer to play chess we would first have to create an intelligence comparable to humans. Turns out you can win by evaluating millions of positions per turn instead. It would be somewhat disappointing for someone who was looking for a human-like opponent, that it can simply be brute forced. But it may be that a lot of “intelligence” is like that. It’s the cognitive equivalent of the Indiana Jones sword vs gun scene.
- JohnFen 2y agoI was deeply involved in voice recognition and OCR back in the day, and nobody working on these things called them "AI". I don't doubt that there were marketing people wanting to attach an AI label to them, but that's just marketing BS.
- ninetyninenine 2y agoYeah but honestly we all know LLMs are different then say some chess ai. You can thank social media for dumbing down a human technological milestone in artificial intelligence. I bet if there was social media around when we landed on the moon you’d get a lot of self important people rolling their eyes at the whole thing too.
- cgearhart 2y agoThis is a pretty common perspective that was introduced to me as “shifting the goalposts” in school. I have always found it a disingenuous argument because it’s applied so narrowly. Humans are intelligent + humans play go => playing go is intelligent Humans are intelligent + humans do algebra => doing algebra is intelligent Meanwhile, humans in general are pretty terrible at exact, instantaneous arithmetic. But we aren’t claiming that computers are intelligent because they’re great at it. Building a machine that does a narrowly defined task better than a human is an achievement, but it’s not intelligence. Although, in the case of LLMs, in context learning is the closest thing I’ve seen to breaking free from the single-purpose nature of traditional ML/AI systems. It’s been interesting to watch for the past couple years because I still don’t think they’re “intelligent”, but it’s not just because they’re one trick ponies anymore. (So maybe the goalposts really are shifting?) I can’t quite articulate yet what I think is missing from current AI to bridge the gap.
- Scarblac 2y ago> Meanwhile, humans in general are pretty terrible at exact, instantaneous arithmetic. But we aren’t claiming that computers are intelligent because they’re great at it. "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra
- fsmv 2y agoIs it really in context learning though? It's just recalling and interpolating things from the internet which there's quite a lot of.
- janalsncm 2y agoSomeday if we have computers that are capable of doing 100% of the cognitive tasks humans do, better than any human can, we might still say it’s “just” doing X or Y. It might even be disappointing that there isn't a “special sauce” to intelligence. But at the end of the day, the mechanism isn’t important. We are already playing with some incredible ingredients. Machines that can instantly recall information, (in principle) connect to any electronic device, and calculate millions of times faster than brains, and perfectly self-replicate. Just using these abilities in a simple way is already pretty darn powerful.
- namaria 2y agoI've said it before, AI is the default way to hype technology. A hundred years ago computers were 'electronic brains'. It goes dormant after loosing its edge and then re-emerges when some research project gains traction again.
- winwang 2y ago"Computer" in (simplified) Chinese is still "电脑" -- literally "electric/electronic brain".
- Terr_ 2y agoIf you trace the etymology of computer in English, it means something like "small chalk/limestone pebbles used for counting do-er." (See Latin "calx".)
- namaria 2y agoAnd digital means 'fingerish'. Etymology can be fun but not always illuminating.
- framapotari 2y agoIn Icelandic, computer is "tölva" which is a combination of "tala" meaning "number" and "völva" meaning "oracle".
- anticensor 2y agoIn Turkish, computer is "bilgisayar" which is a combination of "bilgi" meaning "knowledge" and "sayar" which is an intentional double-entendre of "counter"/"respects".
- namaria 2y agoAnd oracle means 'short announcement' (oraculum) meaning Icelanders call computers 'number announcers'. Interesting! But more seriously, I wonder what the etymology of 'völva' is...
- anodari 2y agoIn the same line, there are also a phrase about technology, "is everything that doesn’t work yet." by Danny Hillis, "Electric motors were once technology – they were new and did not work well. As they evolved, they seem to disappear, even though they proliferated and were embedded by the scores into our homes and offices. They work perfectly, silently, unminded, so they no longer register as “technology.” https://kk.org/thetechnium/everything-that/ https://kk.org/thetechnium/everything-that/
- cubefox 2y agoI think the best definition is AI = machine learning Yes, that makes a convolutional net trained on recognizing digits an AI.
- hatthew 2y agoWhat about computer characters in video games? They're usually controlled by a system that everyone calls AI, but there's almost never any machine learning involved. What about fitting a line to a curve, i.e. linear regression? Definitely ML, but most people don't call it AI.
- cubefox 2y agoI would say people call NPCs "AI" only for historical reasons. Typically handwritten algorithms are not called AI nowadays. I'm not sure, but I think statistical regression already specifies a simple model (e.g. a linear one), while the approach with neural networks doesn't make such strong assumptions about the model. I actually think linear regression isn't usually called ML in practice. Anyway, I meant something like neural networks.
- janalsncm 2y agoThe way it was explained to me, ML is a part of AI, but AI also contains things like planning and symbolic reasoning.
- cubefox 2y agoSymbolic systems are just called software nowadays. Nobody (?) would call WolframAlpha an AI.
- timomaxgalvin 2y agoVoice recognition is still very poor and barely used.
- kombookcha 2y agoInterestingly, a big barrier to voice recognition is the same as with AI assistants - they don't understand context, and so they have a difficult time navigating messy inputs that you need assumed knowledge and contextual understanding for. Which is kinda the baseline for how humans communicate things to eachother with words in the first place.
- timomaxgalvin 2y agoTotally agree. There are really very few situations where people really want voice recognition. The main one is hands free controls when driving or for as a remote control for TV or music.
- kombookcha 2y agoExactly, yeah. The high frequency of mistakes from voice commands is a specific point of friction that makes me still prefer tactile buttons for cars - ideally somewhere you don't have to take your hands off the wheel or your eyes off the road. If voice command got really good, that would probably change for me. Touchscreens are great for phones, but I'm really not a fan of them in cars where I prefer the tactile feedback of knowing what button is under my finger. A lot of it just comes down to having the right tool for the right usecase, really.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoExactly. Machine learning used to be AI and "AI-driven solutions" were peddled over a decade ago. Then that died down. Now suddenly every product has to once again be "powered by AI" (even if under the hood all you're running is a good 'ol SVM).