Compute Hype & AI*

I starred the acronym AI, because ostensibly it means Artificial Intelligence, but there's no intelligence in there.

The computer industry has always been rife with hype, even more so than other fields which attempt to generate profits by overstating and overamplifying what they're doing.  Every day I read about the latest 'advances' in AI*, with increasingly ludicrous claims, such as this one AI* that has supposedly achieved sentience.  Right.  Most people I meet don't even come close to having what I would define as intelligence, never mind sentience.

I remember back in the day, working at Microsoft, when the Internet frenzy hit.  Business people were frantically phoning the consulting group, which I ran, wanting "the Internet".  When asked what they wanted it for, they couldn't say.  The industry had done such a wonderful job hyping it up, describing how it could do everything including slice your loaf of bread, that people just had to have it.  No matter what it was, or whether they actually needed it.  Or could even use it.

It's the same thing with AI*.  All it is is an alternative method of solving problems using a computer.  But even the name evokes the image of some gigantic computer brain that knows all, and can do anything.  It's baffle them with b*s*.  Researchers need to do that to be able to get those grants from governments and industry, run by people who don't know what they're talking about, but boy, does it ever sound impressive.

Believe me, there's absolutely no intelligence, at least how it's defined, in AI except for the programmers that create the software.  And what is created has all the fallacies, biases and inaccuracies of those individuals.  Use it at your own risk.

Yes, with AI*, you can create software that may improve its own algorithms and processing in one very specific problem space, whether it be driving, photo imagery, language, whatever.  But that's all it can do.  It's not general purpose.  And I could do the same thing with any of the other methods for creating software that have existed for 50+ years, in any computer language (including Assembler).  AI* is just a tool to do it a bit easier.

Again, I remember when object-oriented programming was 'invented'.  It too was supposed to revolutionize the industry, allowing programmers to come closer to modelling real world objects.  A number of tools were also written to assist these programmers.  The laugh was that the first object-oriented languages were just preprocessors for procedural programming languages - you were really just writing ordinary code in a different way, thinking about the problem in a different paradigm.

What really concerns me is that most people who don't understand what AI* really is will use it, and start depending on it more and more.  Giving greater power and influence to those who create, distribute and/or sell this stuff.  The world will not be conquered by war, but by willing acceptance of what appears to be benign technology.

Would you really buy a used car from an AI*?  If not, why would you blindly accept a search result, or any sort of suggestion.  The only thing you should depend on is your own judgement, based on as many facts as possible.  Period.