We have had AI for about 75 years. What we don’t have is AGI.
I can’t believe people are downvoting this statement. You can get textbooks and journals titled “Artificial Intelligence”, accredited universities teach the subject, and researchers meet at conferences to discuss the latest research, but apparently that isn’t real because… other people use the term differently?
I dislike OpenAI and LLMs as much as anyone else, but we can still be clear about our terminology.
That’s the whole point. The terminology isn’t clear. “AI” is marketing, not technology.
Words have meanings. Established words have established meanings. If you introduce something new and use words that have meanings radically different from the way they’re usually used, you’re being fundamentally dishonest. “Intelligence” is one of those words that has established meaning in several different fields: common conversation, biology, neuroscience, psychology, and even philosophy. NOTHING that has ever been called “artificial intelligence” is an artificial version of any of these meanings.
Now the first generation I’ll cut some slack for. They genuinely believed (through a combination of hubris and programmer arrogance) that they were really working on the automation of intelligence as per the fuzzy overlap of the aforementioned fields. So them calling it “Artificial Intelligence” was hubris, not cynicism (though even there: it was called other things before “artificial intelligence”; there was some intent to mildly deceive).
Nobody after that gets any slack.
The second generation started talking about “perceptrons” and “multilayer perceptrons” and “feedforward networks” before settling on “neural networks”. Despite the “perceptrons” (a good name) involved in making these having absolutely nothing in common with, you know, networks. Of neurons. Which “neural networks” was clearly intended to invoke. This was grant fodder and nothing more. This was a sop for poorly-educated money supplies to say “ooh, that sounds impressive” and toss cash.
The same applies to swarm intelligence, or genetic algorithms, or machine learning, or or or or. The terminology isn’t selected because it’s an accurate description of the technology involved. “Swarm intelligence” doesn’t in any way resemble how any serious biologist would model swarms. A more honest name might be “particle swarm optimization”. For genetic algorithm a descriptive name that doesn’t deceive would be “stochastic optimization”. For “machine learning” try “statistical pattern recognition”.
And for LLMs try “hallucinating, forest-burning, stochastic parrot”.
NONE of any of this matches anything that is “intelligence” by any definition other than a computer scientist, leaving us with a tautology that would have Anselm staring at you with disapproval and recommending that you through in random prayers here and there to disguise the fact that your entire name and argument in support of that name boils down to “this thing we determined arbitrarily to call artificial intelligence is artificial intelligence” while ignoring literally thousands of years of what “intelligence” means outside of your narrow circle jerk circular argument.
So, yes, indeed, let’s be clear about our technology. We do not have an artificial version of “intelligence” and nothing we have in any way resembles “intelligence” as used by anybody beyond a certain little clique who says “what we define as intelligence is intelligence, Q.E.D.”
“Artificial Intelligence” refers to a sub-discipline of computer science, not an anthropological or neurological study of human capability, and it has been well-defined since the 1960s-70s.
Ah. So your argument is “we have defined ‘intelligence’ in a way that is literally not accepted by anybody but us, therefore we have made an artificial version of it”.
Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of AI.
Bravo.
You’ve managed to recreate one of the most famous 11th century tautologies.
From biology. Or psychology. Or neurology. Or philosophy, even.
It’s pretty clear from their writing that the original AI researchers thought they were on the path to the “intelligence” talked of in these other disciplines and that it only became the very narrowly-defined field mentioned above years after their abject failure at actually capturing what anybody else would call intelligence.
And now the term “artificial intelligence” is essentially just a marketing term, with as much meaning as any other random pair of words used for marketing purposes.
We need to have AI before we start worrying about what happens if it gets smarter than us.
We do not have AI.
We have had AI for about 75 years. What we don’t have is AGI.
I can’t believe people are downvoting this statement. You can get textbooks and journals titled “Artificial Intelligence”, accredited universities teach the subject, and researchers meet at conferences to discuss the latest research, but apparently that isn’t real because… other people use the term differently?
I dislike OpenAI and LLMs as much as anyone else, but we can still be clear about our terminology.
That’s the whole point. The terminology isn’t clear. “AI” is marketing, not technology.
Words have meanings. Established words have established meanings. If you introduce something new and use words that have meanings radically different from the way they’re usually used, you’re being fundamentally dishonest. “Intelligence” is one of those words that has established meaning in several different fields: common conversation, biology, neuroscience, psychology, and even philosophy. NOTHING that has ever been called “artificial intelligence” is an artificial version of any of these meanings.
Now the first generation I’ll cut some slack for. They genuinely believed (through a combination of hubris and programmer arrogance) that they were really working on the automation of intelligence as per the fuzzy overlap of the aforementioned fields. So them calling it “Artificial Intelligence” was hubris, not cynicism (though even there: it was called other things before “artificial intelligence”; there was some intent to mildly deceive).
Nobody after that gets any slack.
The second generation started talking about “perceptrons” and “multilayer perceptrons” and “feedforward networks” before settling on “neural networks”. Despite the “perceptrons” (a good name) involved in making these having absolutely nothing in common with, you know, networks. Of neurons. Which “neural networks” was clearly intended to invoke. This was grant fodder and nothing more. This was a sop for poorly-educated money supplies to say “ooh, that sounds impressive” and toss cash.
The same applies to swarm intelligence, or genetic algorithms, or machine learning, or or or or. The terminology isn’t selected because it’s an accurate description of the technology involved. “Swarm intelligence” doesn’t in any way resemble how any serious biologist would model swarms. A more honest name might be “particle swarm optimization”. For genetic algorithm a descriptive name that doesn’t deceive would be “stochastic optimization”. For “machine learning” try “statistical pattern recognition”.
And for LLMs try “hallucinating, forest-burning, stochastic parrot”.
NONE of any of this matches anything that is “intelligence” by any definition other than a computer scientist, leaving us with a tautology that would have Anselm staring at you with disapproval and recommending that you through in random prayers here and there to disguise the fact that your entire name and argument in support of that name boils down to “this thing we determined arbitrarily to call artificial intelligence is artificial intelligence” while ignoring literally thousands of years of what “intelligence” means outside of your narrow
circle jerkcircular argument.So, yes, indeed, let’s be clear about our technology. We do not have an artificial version of “intelligence” and nothing we have in any way resembles “intelligence” as used by anybody beyond a certain little clique who says “what we define as intelligence is intelligence, Q.E.D.”
The Anselm clique, I like to call them.
We’ve had goalposts for 75 years. What we don’t have is a way to stop grifters from redefining them.
We can’t even agree on a definition for “intelligence” so it’s pretty obvious we haven’t got an artificial version of it yet.
Can’t make what you can’t even define, after all. “Artificial intelligence” is about as meaningful a term as “artificial geflugelschnitz”.
“Artificial Intelligence” refers to a sub-discipline of computer science, not an anthropological or neurological study of human capability, and it has been well-defined since the 1960s-70s.
Ah. So your argument is “we have defined ‘intelligence’ in a way that is literally not accepted by anybody but us, therefore we have made an artificial version of it”.
Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of AI.
Bravo.
You’ve managed to recreate one of the most famous 11th century tautologies.
If it’s about computer science, then use terms from computer science instead of misleading and dishonest terms from biology.
“Data processing” is fine.
From biology. Or psychology. Or neurology. Or philosophy, even.
It’s pretty clear from their writing that the original AI researchers thought they were on the path to the “intelligence” talked of in these other disciplines and that it only became the very narrowly-defined field mentioned above years after their abject failure at actually capturing what anybody else would call intelligence.
And now the term “artificial intelligence” is essentially just a marketing term, with as much meaning as any other random pair of words used for marketing purposes.