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The sentiment of the title is reflected in this comment [0] from a few hours ago: We use so much AI in production every day but nobody notices because as soo

The sentiment of the title is reflected in this comment [0] from a few hours ago: We use so much AI in production every day but nobody notices because as soon as a technology becomes useful, we stop calling it AI. Then it’s suddenly “just face recognition” or “just product recommendations” or “just [plane] autopilot” or “just adaptive cruise control” etc [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44207603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44207603

JimDabell 1y ago
This is known as the AI effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
- dunham 1y ago
  I remember being taught in my late 90's AI class something along the lines of: "AI is anything we don't know how to solve, and it gets another name when we figure out how to solve it".
  - neilv 1y ago
    Same here. "AI is things we currently think are hard to do with computers" "AI is things that are currently easier for humans than computers".
layer8 1y ago
I don’t think that’s the sentiment of the title.
- MontyCarloHall 1y ago
  It is exactly the sentiment of the title. From the paper's conclusion: Although most financiers avoided "artificial intelligence" firms in the early 1990s, several successful firms have utilized core AI technologies into their products. They may call them intelligence applications or knowledge management systems, or they may focus on the solution, such as customer relationship management, like Pegasystems, or email management, as in the case of Kana Communications. The former expert systems companies, described in Table 6.1, are mostly applying their expert system technology to a particular area, such as network management or electronic customer service. All of these firms today show promise in providing solutions to real problems. In other words, once a product robustly solves a real customer problem, it is no longer thought of as "AI," despite utilizing technologies commonly thought of as "artificial intelligence" in their contemporary eras (e.g. expert systems in the 80s/90s, statistical machine learning in the 2000s, artificial neural nets in the 2010s onwards). Today, nobody thinks of expert systems as AI; it's just a decision tree. A kernel support vector machine is just a supervised binary classifier. And so on.
  - layer8 1y ago
    The paper is picking up a long-standing joke in its title. From https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260007-9.pdf https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00965R0001002... (1987): All these [AI] endeavors remain at such an experimental stage that a joke is making the rounds among computer scientists: “If it works, it’s not AI.” The article is re-evaluating that prior reality, but it isn’t making the point that successful AI stops being considered AI. In the part you quote, it’s merely pointing out that AI technology isn’t always marketed as such, due to the negative connotation “AI” had acquired.
kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
Predicting the trajectory of a cannonball is applied mathematics. Aircract autopilot and cruise control are only slightly more elaborate. You can't label every algorithmic control system as "AI".
- MontyCarloHall 1y ago
  I agree that aircraft autopilot/other basic applications of control theory are not usually considered "AI," nor were they ever — control theory has its roots in mechanical governors. Certain adaptive cruise control systems certainly are considered AI (e.g. ones that utilize cameras for emergency braking or lane-keep assist). The line can be fuzzy — for instance, are solvers of optimization problems in operations research "AI"? If you told people in the 1930s that computers would be used in a decade by shipping companies to optimally schedule and route packages or by militaries to organize wartime logistics at a massive scale, many would certainly have considered that some form of intelligence.
- jagged-chisel 1y ago
  It’s “AI” until it gets another name. It doesn’t get that other name until it’s been in use for a bit and users start understanding its use. So you’re right that some of these things aren’t AI now. But they were called that at the start of development.
- hamilyon2 1y ago
  Yes. Chess engine is clever tree search at it's core. Which in turn is just loops, arithmetic and updating some data structures. And every AI product in existence is the same. Map navigation, search engine ranking, even register allocation and query planning. Thus they are not AI, they're algorithms. The frontier is constantly moving.
  - andoando 1y ago
    There is a big divide between problem specific problem solving and general intelligence.
hliyan 1y ago
Funnily enough, this same year (1999), I wrote an essay for a university AI subject where I concluded "Intelligence is a label we apply to information processing for which we have not yet identified an algorithm. As soon as an algorithm is discovered, it ceases to be intelligence and becomes computation". I thought I was very clever, but later discovered that this thought occurs to almost everyone who thinks about artificial intelligence in any reasonable depth.
- pinoy420 1y ago
  [dead]
- MichaelZuo 1y ago
  This would imply “artificial intelligence” itself is a nonsensical term… as in “artifical [label we apply to information processing for which we have not yet identified an algorithm]”.
  - kevinventullo 1y ago
    I dunno, the opacity of LLM’s might kind of fit the bill for not having an “algorithm” in the usual sense, even if it is possible in theory to boil them down to cathedrals of if-statements.
CooCooCaCha 1y ago
I'm reminded of AI hypesters complaining that people are constantly moving the goalposts of AI. It's a similar effect and I think both have a similar reason. When people think of AI they think of robots that can think like us. That can solve arbitrary problems, plan for the future, logically reason, etc. In an autonomous fashion. That's always been true. So the goal posts haven't really moved, instead it's a continuous cycle of hype, understanding, disappointment, and acceptance. Every time a computer exhibits a new capability that's human-like, like recognizing faces, we wonder if this is what the start of AGI looks like, and unfortunately that's not been the case so far.
- simonw 1y ago
  The term "artificial intelligence" started out in academia in 1956. Science fiction started using that language later.
  - CooCooCaCha 1y ago
    I'm not concerned with who used what and when. I'm talking about what people expect of AI. When you tell people that you're trying to create digital intelligence, they'll inevitably compare it to people. That's the expectation.
  - neepi 1y ago
    The term AI was invented because Claude Shannon was fed up of getting automata papers.
    - simonw 1y ago
      I thought it was John McCarthy trying to avoid having to use the term "cybernetics".
- parineum 1y ago
  I think you're spot in with this. It's the enthusiasts that are constantly trying to move the goalposts towards them and then the general public puts it back where it goes once they catch on. AGI is what people think of when they hear AI. AI is a bastardized term that people use to either justify, hype and/or sell their research, business or products. The reason "AI" stops being AI once it becomes mainstream is that people figure out that it's not AI once they see the limitations of whatever the latest iteration is.
jodrellblank 1y ago
This is one of my pet dislikes; so after 1950, a time when a computer that could win at tic-tac-toe was ‘AI’, nobody is ever allowed to talk about AI again without that whinge being posted? Because AI was solved then so shut up? The author of that whinge thinks that what we all wanted from Artificial Intelligence all along was a HAAR cascade or a chess min-maxer, that was the dream all along? The author thinks that talking intelligence any more is what, “unfair” now? What are they even whining about? Because the computers of yesteryear were slow enough that winning a simple board game was their limit, you can’t talk about what’s next! And thats to put aside the face recognition that Google put out which classified dark skinned humans as gorillas, not because it was making a value judgement about race but because it has no understanding of the picture or the text label. Or the product recommendation engines which recommend another hundred refrigerators after you just bought one, and the engineers on the internet who defend that by saying it genuinely is the most effective advert to show, and calling those systems “intelligent” just because they are new. Putting a radar on a car lets it follow the car in front at a distance because there is a computer to connect the radar, engine, and brakes and not because the car has gained an understanding of what distance and crashing are.
- potatoman22 1y ago
  I don't think anyone is saying "you can't call facial recognition AI." I think their point is that laypeople tend to move the goalpost of what's considered AI.
  - jodrellblank 1y ago
    And my point is: so what? [edit: missed a bit; it's not 'moving the goalposts' because those things were never the goal of Artificial Intelligence!]. A hundred years ago tap water was a luxury. Fifty years ago drinkable tap water was a luxury. Do we constantly have to keep hearing that we can’t call anything today a “luxury” because in the past “luxury” was achieved already?
    - potatoman22 1y ago
      I mean you can call it AI/a luxury still. Tap water is nice, pathfinding algorithms are nice. It doesn't matter to me if people use "AI" whenever they want. Sometimes it's a little silly, but harmless. It's like if someone called sliced bread a luxury: they're not wrong but it is a bit silly to say depending where you live.
AIPedant 1y ago
What this really reflects is that before these problems were solved it was assumed (without any real evidence) the solutions required something like intelligence. But that turned out to not be the case, and “AI” is the wrong term to use. There’s also the effect of “machine learning” being used imprecisely so it inhabits a squishy middle between “computational statistics” and “AI.”
alkonaut 1y ago
I don’t know, isn’t ”AI” more a family of technologies like neural networks etc? Facial recognition using such tech is and was always AI, while adaptive cruise control using a single distance sensor and PID regulation is just normalcontrol” and not AI? I never heard about AI being used in plane autopilots, no matter how clever.

JimDabell 1y ago

This is known as the AI effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

dunham 1y ago
I remember being taught in my late 90's AI class something along the lines of: "AI is anything we don't know how to solve, and it gets another name when we figure out how to solve it".
- neilv 1y ago
  Same here. "AI is things we currently think are hard to do with computers" "AI is things that are currently easier for humans than computers".

layer8 1y ago

I don’t think that’s the sentiment of the title.

MontyCarloHall 1y ago
It is exactly the sentiment of the title. From the paper's conclusion: Although most financiers avoided "artificial intelligence" firms in the early 1990s, several successful firms have utilized core AI technologies into their products. They may call them intelligence applications or knowledge management systems, or they may focus on the solution, such as customer relationship management, like Pegasystems, or email management, as in the case of Kana Communications. The former expert systems companies, described in Table 6.1, are mostly applying their expert system technology to a particular area, such as network management or electronic customer service. All of these firms today show promise in providing solutions to real problems. In other words, once a product robustly solves a real customer problem, it is no longer thought of as "AI," despite utilizing technologies commonly thought of as "artificial intelligence" in their contemporary eras (e.g. expert systems in the 80s/90s, statistical machine learning in the 2000s, artificial neural nets in the 2010s onwards). Today, nobody thinks of expert systems as AI; it's just a decision tree. A kernel support vector machine is just a supervised binary classifier. And so on.
- layer8 1y ago
  The paper is picking up a long-standing joke in its title. From https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260007-9.pdf https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP90-00965R0001002... (1987): All these [AI] endeavors remain at such an experimental stage that a joke is making the rounds among computer scientists: “If it works, it’s not AI.” The article is re-evaluating that prior reality, but it isn’t making the point that successful AI stops being considered AI. In the part you quote, it’s merely pointing out that AI technology isn’t always marketed as such, due to the negative connotation “AI” had acquired.

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago

Predicting the trajectory of a cannonball is applied mathematics. Aircract autopilot and cruise control are only slightly more elaborate. You can't label every algorithmic control system as "AI".

MontyCarloHall 1y ago
I agree that aircraft autopilot/other basic applications of control theory are not usually considered "AI," nor were they ever — control theory has its roots in mechanical governors. Certain adaptive cruise control systems certainly are considered AI (e.g. ones that utilize cameras for emergency braking or lane-keep assist). The line can be fuzzy — for instance, are solvers of optimization problems in operations research "AI"? If you told people in the 1930s that computers would be used in a decade by shipping companies to optimally schedule and route packages or by militaries to organize wartime logistics at a massive scale, many would certainly have considered that some form of intelligence.
jagged-chisel 1y ago
It’s “AI” until it gets another name. It doesn’t get that other name until it’s been in use for a bit and users start understanding its use. So you’re right that some of these things aren’t AI now. But they were called that at the start of development.
hamilyon2 1y ago
Yes. Chess engine is clever tree search at it's core. Which in turn is just loops, arithmetic and updating some data structures. And every AI product in existence is the same. Map navigation, search engine ranking, even register allocation and query planning. Thus they are not AI, they're algorithms. The frontier is constantly moving.
- andoando 1y ago
  There is a big divide between problem specific problem solving and general intelligence.

hliyan 1y ago

Funnily enough, this same year (1999), I wrote an essay for a university AI subject where I concluded "Intelligence is a label we apply to information processing for which we have not yet identified an algorithm. As soon as an algorithm is discovered, it ceases to be intelligence and becomes computation". I thought I was very clever, but later discovered that this thought occurs to almost everyone who thinks about artificial intelligence in any reasonable depth.

pinoy420 1y ago
[dead]
MichaelZuo 1y ago
This would imply “artificial intelligence” itself is a nonsensical term… as in “artifical [label we apply to information processing for which we have not yet identified an algorithm]”.
- kevinventullo 1y ago
  I dunno, the opacity of LLM’s might kind of fit the bill for not having an “algorithm” in the usual sense, even if it is possible in theory to boil them down to cathedrals of if-statements.

CooCooCaCha 1y ago

I'm reminded of AI hypesters complaining that people are constantly moving the goalposts of AI. It's a similar effect and I think both have a similar reason. When people think of AI they think of robots that can think like us. That can solve arbitrary problems, plan for the future, logically reason, etc. In an autonomous fashion. That's always been true. So the goal posts haven't really moved, instead it's a continuous cycle of hype, understanding, disappointment, and acceptance. Every time a computer exhibits a new capability that's human-like, like recognizing faces, we wonder if this is what the start of AGI looks like, and unfortunately that's not been the case so far.

simonw 1y ago
The term "artificial intelligence" started out in academia in 1956. Science fiction started using that language later.
- CooCooCaCha 1y ago
  I'm not concerned with who used what and when. I'm talking about what people expect of AI. When you tell people that you're trying to create digital intelligence, they'll inevitably compare it to people. That's the expectation.
- neepi 1y ago
  The term AI was invented because Claude Shannon was fed up of getting automata papers.
  - simonw 1y ago
    I thought it was John McCarthy trying to avoid having to use the term "cybernetics".
parineum 1y ago
I think you're spot in with this. It's the enthusiasts that are constantly trying to move the goalposts towards them and then the general public puts it back where it goes once they catch on. AGI is what people think of when they hear AI. AI is a bastardized term that people use to either justify, hype and/or sell their research, business or products. The reason "AI" stops being AI once it becomes mainstream is that people figure out that it's not AI once they see the limitations of whatever the latest iteration is.

jodrellblank 1y ago

This is one of my pet dislikes; so after 1950, a time when a computer that could win at tic-tac-toe was ‘AI’, nobody is ever allowed to talk about AI again without that whinge being posted? Because AI was solved then so shut up? The author of that whinge thinks that what we all wanted from Artificial Intelligence all along was a HAAR cascade or a chess min-maxer, that was the dream all along? The author thinks that talking intelligence any more is what, “unfair” now? What are they even whining about? Because the computers of yesteryear were slow enough that winning a simple board game was their limit, you can’t talk about what’s next! And thats to put aside the face recognition that Google put out which classified dark skinned humans as gorillas, not because it was making a value judgement about race but because it has no understanding of the picture or the text label. Or the product recommendation engines which recommend another hundred refrigerators after you just bought one, and the engineers on the internet who defend that by saying it genuinely is the most effective advert to show, and calling those systems “intelligent” just because they are new. Putting a radar on a car lets it follow the car in front at a distance because there is a computer to connect the radar, engine, and brakes and not because the car has gained an understanding of what distance and crashing are.

potatoman22 1y ago
I don't think anyone is saying "you can't call facial recognition AI." I think their point is that laypeople tend to move the goalpost of what's considered AI.
- jodrellblank 1y ago
  And my point is: so what? [edit: missed a bit; it's not 'moving the goalposts' because those things were never the goal of Artificial Intelligence!]. A hundred years ago tap water was a luxury. Fifty years ago drinkable tap water was a luxury. Do we constantly have to keep hearing that we can’t call anything today a “luxury” because in the past “luxury” was achieved already?
  - potatoman22 1y ago
    I mean you can call it AI/a luxury still. Tap water is nice, pathfinding algorithms are nice. It doesn't matter to me if people use "AI" whenever they want. Sometimes it's a little silly, but harmless. It's like if someone called sliced bread a luxury: they're not wrong but it is a bit silly to say depending where you live.

AIPedant 1y ago

What this really reflects is that before these problems were solved it was assumed (without any real evidence) the solutions required something like intelligence. But that turned out to not be the case, and “AI” is the wrong term to use. There’s also the effect of “machine learning” being used imprecisely so it inhabits a squishy middle between “computational statistics” and “AI.”

alkonaut 1y ago

I don’t know, isn’t ”AI” more a family of technologies like neural networks etc? Facial recognition using such tech is and was always AI, while adaptive cruise control using a single distance sensor and PID regulation is just normalcontrol” and not AI? I never heard about AI being used in plane autopilots, no matter how clever.