6 years ago
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'The discourse is unhinged': how the media gets AI alarmingly wrong
Social media has allowed self-proclaimed ‘AI influencers’ who do nothing more than paraphrase Elon Musk to cash in on this hype with low-quality pieces. The result is dangerous
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https://www.theguardian.com
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Our HR department is touting it's use of AI in searching for candidates. Hogwash.
Having said that, I am an avid science fiction fan. I do fear a machine that "thinks" and makes decisions...aka, autonomous weapons. I also have this niggling thought that someday machines will develop their own language based on their "thought" processes. Not today, and maybe a long way off. We are beginning the age of advanced biomechanics. We are growing brain tissue. the convergence of man and machine is inevitable. When that happens, will it still be called AI?
At its best AI is currently a very sophisticated regression tool. If you can use “add trendline”in Excel, you’ve already used a very primitive version of AI.
There have been very clever uses of it, and I don’t mean to invalidate them, but I wish the media stopped the whole “the machines are becoming sentient and will destroy humanity” hype. On the other hand, they don’t make money by being grounded and objective. Just like politicians don’t win votes by being honest.
Minor quibble: this dismissal of AI is too easy, in that it's a rather stinging indictment of the subfield of connectionism more so than, say: symbolic reasoning; genetic algorithms and classifier systems; artificial life more generally evolving computationally over enormous timescales; strong, numerous, belligerent, incorporated AIs; or any number of other approaches. Which isn't to say that even simple linear regression isn't an indispensable tool. It is. I'll admit, though, it'd really harsh my buzz if it was sufficiently expressive for strong AI.