5 ms·

Part of the hate surrounding AI is that it is being sold as AI, but it really, really isn't the AI of the kind you read as a child 20 years ago.

nerdsniper 4mo ago
When I was a kid, “AI” was quake 2 bots, starcraft pathfinding algorithms, and chessbot personalities. I dont understand why the old definition of AI keeps being retconned.
- lazide 4mo ago
  Branding. LLM’s (as a term!) are too specific for the ‘conquer the world’ narratives the VCs want to justify the high valuations. Machine Learning sounds too technical. AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him. FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?
  - marcosdumay 4mo ago
    I really like the idea of AI being the brand of whatever we are hyping so much that will inevitably fail spectacularly and turn the entire society against it for a couple of decades. The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working towards.
    - joquarky 4mo ago
      As an aside: why have we allowed marketing people to take over?
      - marcosdumay 4mo ago
        The marketing people didn't take over. Some self-aggrandizing self-destroying billionaires did. I'm not sure why we allowed it, but they have been working on it for more than 50 years. My best guess is that they just kept insisting on it until people lost attention for an instant, and then did it again, and again.
      - queenkjuul 4mo ago
        Unfortunately the West has yet to have their socialist revolutions
        marcosdumay 4mo ago
        What's "the West"? UK an Germany practically invented the concept, and the US practically wrote the manual on how to make a welfare state.
        queenkjuul 4mo ago
        Hilarious
- gobdovan 4mo ago
  IQ tests are restandardised from time to time. We could take the scores from 100 years ago and see that everybody would be gifted. Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.
  - bvfthnvxxdgbnk 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - gobdovan 4mo ago
    [0] JR Flynn: The mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978. [1] Legg, S., Hutter, M.: A collection of definitions of intelligence [2] François Chollet, On the Measure of Intelligence
  - skeledrew 4mo ago
    So it's an ever-shifting goalpost, which makes it pretty useless as an objective.
    - gobdovan 4mo ago
      Yeah, but there's attempts to fix it. The Cholet paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547) is a good attempt, shifting from measuring ~skill to measuring ~acquiring skill. It's the framework behind ARC-AGI benchmarks.
- joquarky 4mo ago
  Many people can't abide being something other than the center of the universe, and they get antsy when something might challenge that "unique" position. Imagine if we had social media during the flip from geocentrism.
- pixl97 4mo ago
  >old definition of AI There was never any old definition AI that limited it to such a tiny set of capabilities. AI is controversial because the term intelligent is controversial and covers so much.
- bmacho 4mo ago
  You are very wrong here. The term "AI" never meant bots in general. It's true that in games bots were also called AI but only in a specific context and niche, and it is not what the whole conversation is about.
SoftTalker 4mo ago
Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.
- ryandrake 4mo ago
  An optimist can hope AI and robotics brings us into a post-scarcity world and that society responds with utopia rather than just disposing of the 99% of people who become economically irrelevant. History has a pessimistic vibe though.
  - skeledrew 4mo ago
    A pessimist would preempt the disposal of that 99% by ensuring the 1% doesn't monopolize AI and robotics. By whatever means necessary.
  - senordevnyc 4mo ago
    History has the most optimistic vibe imaginable, what are you talking about?? Look at where we are as a species right now, vs century ago, a millennium ago, ten thousand years ago! What period of history would you want your children to be born into, with zero control over where or who they’d be born to? Just a random person on the earth on a date you choose, what would be your choice?
    - ryandrake 4mo ago
      There is none, and that’s my point. Despite technological advances throughout history that made things easier to do and less scarce, over and over we keep the scarcity mindset and winner-takes-most economics around, funneling the majority of the value and benefits up to the few. At every point when some advancement could have greatly improved everyone’s lot in life, humanity chose to spread that improvement around to the masses as thinly as possible, just enough to avoid social upheaval, and shipped the rest of the value into the pockets of the richest 1%.
beering 4mo ago
Is it not? You can talk to it in plain English and it can do things for you and respond back in a synthesized voice. I was reading an old Asimov short story about a guy who comes across a lost robot and has to trick it into staying put, and it felt weirdly prescient. (The story is “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”)
- bvfthnvxxdgbnk 4mo ago
  [dead]
- newaccountman2 4mo ago
  It's not really "intelligence" It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.
  - the13 4mo ago
    Agree, you're technically correct, and AI it's solving Erdos problems, even if we don't know exactly how or why. More mech interp & other research will help. https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808 https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808
  - skeledrew 4mo ago
    Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. And of course we continue to have the same vision now that X won't be possible for a great many years, if ever. And we also continually carefully refine the generally accepted definition of "intelligence" so that it specifically excludes whatever the current capabilities are, so we can indefinitely continue to say "this isn't intelligence".
    - newaccountman2 4mo ago
      > Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. I agree with that, but I don't think anyone is moving the goalposts as you imply later in your post.
bananaflag 4mo ago
What do you mean? It's exactly what every child has read in the past 80 years: you can talk to the computer and it does intellectual work like math or coding or writing stories.
YoukaiCountry 4mo ago
If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it. Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?
- mooreds 4mo ago
  > We can have actual conversations with our computers, Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them. It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.
- yallpendantools 4mo ago
  I think it's not so much the technical scope that makes it "not the AI you read of as a child" but the societal impact. AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails. Cue the quote about AI supposedly about taking over the boring tasks so we can spend more time making art, achieving self-actualization. The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages. And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!
  - xg15 4mo ago
    Maybe also whether AI is a "person" or not? A prominent theme of AI in fiction was discussion whether an AI can have a consciousness, can be considered to be an individual, etc - with author and reader usually being on the "yes, they are a person" side. Even if not, interesting AIs were at least interesting characters in a story sense (e.g. C3P0). Now we're dealing with effectively the opposite - something that looks and behaves like a person but is decidedly not one. If you grew up with all the scifi about sympathetic (or at least charismatic) AI characters, this is probably sobering.
elxr 4mo ago
That has to be the silliest reason to hate AI I've seen yet, next to the "don't you know how many gallons of water are being used up!!!" Replace "AI" in that sentence with any rapidly evolving tech: social networks, smart homes, digital governments, hell - even online shopping. The versions of any of those things a child would've read 20 years ago won't have anywhere near the complexities and unexpected downsides all those things ended up having in real life. 20 years ago, AI to (kid) me was a real life C3PO, or an npc in an open-world game that existed in that world with their own motivation and story independent of what you did. Or the stereotypical humanoid robot with consciousness like in the film "A.I.". No kid could've imagined vibe coding, running sub-agents, diffusion models, AI zombies, and all this other stuff we have today. Everything you imagined as a child is still possible, and depending on what exactly you read, is already here. Yeah the UX is different than what anyone 20 years ago would've predicted, but how does this mean the "hate" make sense? That's not even 0.1% of the reason the typical anti-AI people are against AI.

nerdsniper 4mo ago

When I was a kid, “AI” was quake 2 bots, starcraft pathfinding algorithms, and chessbot personalities. I dont understand why the old definition of AI keeps being retconned.

lazide 4mo ago
Branding. LLM’s (as a term!) are too specific for the ‘conquer the world’ narratives the VCs want to justify the high valuations. Machine Learning sounds too technical. AI is pithy, and can be anything from skynet to… skynet. Or clippy, technically, but everyone seems to have forgotten about him. FOMO drives the valuation, and the more vagueness and ambiguity you can have, the easier it is to stoke it. And if the option is being part owner of a world conquering, game changing tech - or a victim - which would you choose?
- marcosdumay 4mo ago
  I really like the idea of AI being the brand of whatever we are hyping so much that will inevitably fail spectacularly and turn the entire society against it for a couple of decades. The name basically means anything a computer can do, and has meant almost anything a computer does at some point. So it's not a very useful word anyway, no loss in letting marketers use it to whatever Tormentus Nexus they are working towards.
  - joquarky 4mo ago
    As an aside: why have we allowed marketing people to take over?
    - marcosdumay 4mo ago
      The marketing people didn't take over. Some self-aggrandizing self-destroying billionaires did. I'm not sure why we allowed it, but they have been working on it for more than 50 years. My best guess is that they just kept insisting on it until people lost attention for an instant, and then did it again, and again.
    - queenkjuul 4mo ago
      Unfortunately the West has yet to have their socialist revolutions
      - marcosdumay 4mo ago
        What's "the West"? UK an Germany practically invented the concept, and the US practically wrote the manual on how to make a welfare state.
        queenkjuul 4mo ago
        Hilarious
gobdovan 4mo ago
IQ tests are restandardised from time to time. We could take the scores from 100 years ago and see that everybody would be gifted. Intelligence is usually defined as the skill in pursuing a goal, or speed of acquiring the ability for pursuing given goal. Given the goal-dependent nature, it's not that useful to use the same tests and measurements for intelligence over time, be it artificial or not.
- bvfthnvxxdgbnk 4mo ago
  [dead]
- gobdovan 4mo ago
  [0] JR Flynn: The mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978. [1] Legg, S., Hutter, M.: A collection of definitions of intelligence [2] François Chollet, On the Measure of Intelligence
- skeledrew 4mo ago
  So it's an ever-shifting goalpost, which makes it pretty useless as an objective.
  - gobdovan 4mo ago
    Yeah, but there's attempts to fix it. The Cholet paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547) is a good attempt, shifting from measuring ~skill to measuring ~acquiring skill. It's the framework behind ARC-AGI benchmarks.
joquarky 4mo ago
Many people can't abide being something other than the center of the universe, and they get antsy when something might challenge that "unique" position. Imagine if we had social media during the flip from geocentrism.
pixl97 4mo ago
>old definition of AI There was never any old definition AI that limited it to such a tiny set of capabilities. AI is controversial because the term intelligent is controversial and covers so much.
bmacho 4mo ago
You are very wrong here. The term "AI" never meant bots in general. It's true that in games bots were also called AI but only in a specific context and niche, and it is not what the whole conversation is about.

SoftTalker 4mo ago

Yes. We were supposed to have the Star Trek post-scarcity economy, whereas what we're getting is layoffs, rent-seeking and wealth extraction at every turn, complete loss of personal privacy, everything getting more expensive, and no hope for the future. Meanwhile I'm still washing and folding my clothes every week.

ryandrake 4mo ago
An optimist can hope AI and robotics brings us into a post-scarcity world and that society responds with utopia rather than just disposing of the 99% of people who become economically irrelevant. History has a pessimistic vibe though.
- skeledrew 4mo ago
  A pessimist would preempt the disposal of that 99% by ensuring the 1% doesn't monopolize AI and robotics. By whatever means necessary.
- senordevnyc 4mo ago
  History has the most optimistic vibe imaginable, what are you talking about?? Look at where we are as a species right now, vs century ago, a millennium ago, ten thousand years ago! What period of history would you want your children to be born into, with zero control over where or who they’d be born to? Just a random person on the earth on a date you choose, what would be your choice?
  - ryandrake 4mo ago
    There is none, and that’s my point. Despite technological advances throughout history that made things easier to do and less scarce, over and over we keep the scarcity mindset and winner-takes-most economics around, funneling the majority of the value and benefits up to the few. At every point when some advancement could have greatly improved everyone’s lot in life, humanity chose to spread that improvement around to the masses as thinly as possible, just enough to avoid social upheaval, and shipped the rest of the value into the pockets of the richest 1%.

beering 4mo ago

Is it not? You can talk to it in plain English and it can do things for you and respond back in a synthesized voice. I was reading an old Asimov short story about a guy who comes across a lost robot and has to trick it into staying put, and it felt weirdly prescient. (The story is “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray”)

bvfthnvxxdgbnk 4mo ago
[dead]
newaccountman2 4mo ago
It's not really "intelligence" It's just the mimicry thereof. I probably fall into the "pro-AI" camp if we want to divide things along the binary, but it's pretty facile to consider this software to possess or represent "intelligence" IMO.
- the13 4mo ago
  Agree, you're technically correct, and AI it's solving Erdos problems, even if we don't know exactly how or why. More mech interp & other research will help. https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808 https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2060451757818601808
- skeledrew 4mo ago
  Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. And of course we continue to have the same vision now that X won't be possible for a great many years, if ever. And we also continually carefully refine the generally accepted definition of "intelligence" so that it specifically excludes whatever the current capabilities are, so we can indefinitely continue to say "this isn't intelligence".
  - newaccountman2 4mo ago
    > Yet it doesn't detract from the fact that 20 years ago this was purely sci-fi; nobody - or a least very few - then envisioned that we'd have the capability we have currently have. I agree with that, but I don't think anyone is moving the goalposts as you imply later in your post.

bananaflag 4mo ago

What do you mean? It's exactly what every child has read in the past 80 years: you can talk to the computer and it does intellectual work like math or coding or writing stories.

YoukaiCountry 4mo ago

If you could show people 20 years ago what we have now, I have no doubt most people would have considered it AI. We can have actual conversations with our computers, they can now interact with tools they are provided, and act in a reasonably intelligent manner for a great many tasks. 20-year-ago-me would have barely been able to believe it. Is this sort of stance that this "isn't AI" missing the forest for the trees?

mooreds 4mo ago
> We can have actual conversations with our computers, Not just computers, but documents! It's amazing to be able to paste in a few RFCs and then interrogate the documents to get a better understanding of them. It is truly an amazing time we live in. I get the worries and fear too, but it is still amazing.
yallpendantools 4mo ago
I think it's not so much the technical scope that makes it "not the AI you read of as a child" but the societal impact. AI/robots/automation was supposed to usher in some kind of techno-utopia for all the good and bad that it entails. Cue the quote about AI supposedly about taking over the boring tasks so we can spend more time making art, achieving self-actualization. The AI you read of as a child (speaking for myself, coming from a lot of 80s sci-fi stories) is not all good of course; that's where most of the plot's conflict comes from. But LLMs, for a lot of people, are more burdened with the downsides sci-fi stories warned us about with very little, if any, of the advantages. And speaking of forests for the trees, you zoom out a bit more and see that this AI hype train is following a years-long trend of SV being exposed for its moral failings. We have repeatedly shown, as an industry, that we missed the point of the literature we so love to quote. From the concept of "meritocracy" to naming a company "Palantir". The AI hype is not an isolated incident. We love to quote Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park but it's all rhetoric---we don't really ask ourselves that question!
- xg15 4mo ago
  Maybe also whether AI is a "person" or not? A prominent theme of AI in fiction was discussion whether an AI can have a consciousness, can be considered to be an individual, etc - with author and reader usually being on the "yes, they are a person" side. Even if not, interesting AIs were at least interesting characters in a story sense (e.g. C3P0). Now we're dealing with effectively the opposite - something that looks and behaves like a person but is decidedly not one. If you grew up with all the scifi about sympathetic (or at least charismatic) AI characters, this is probably sobering.

elxr 4mo ago

That has to be the silliest reason to hate AI I've seen yet, next to the "don't you know how many gallons of water are being used up!!!" Replace "AI" in that sentence with any rapidly evolving tech: social networks, smart homes, digital governments, hell - even online shopping. The versions of any of those things a child would've read 20 years ago won't have anywhere near the complexities and unexpected downsides all those things ended up having in real life. 20 years ago, AI to (kid) me was a real life C3PO, or an npc in an open-world game that existed in that world with their own motivation and story independent of what you did. Or the stereotypical humanoid robot with consciousness like in the film "A.I.". No kid could've imagined vibe coding, running sub-agents, diffusion models, AI zombies, and all this other stuff we have today. Everything you imagined as a child is still possible, and depending on what exactly you read, is already here. Yeah the UX is different than what anyone 20 years ago would've predicted, but how does this mean the "hate" make sense? That's not even 0.1% of the reason the typical anti-AI people are against AI.