Internet nastiness, name-calling, and other not-so-petty, world-altering disagreements..
AI is sexy, AI is cool. AI is entrenching inequality, upending the job market, and wrecking education. AI is a theme-park ride, AI is a magic trick. AI is our final invention, AI is a moral obligation. AI is the buzzword of the decade, AI is marketing jargon from 1955. AI is humanlike, AI is alien. AI is super-smart and as dumb as dirt. The AI boom will boost the economy, the AI bubble is about to burst. AI will increase abundance and empower humanity to maximally flourish in the universe. AI will kill us all.
What the hell is everybody talking about?
Artificial intelligence is the hottest technology of our time. But what is it?
It sounds like a stupid question, but it’s one that’s never been more urgent. Here’s the short answer: AI is a catchall term for a set of technologies that make computers do things that are thought to require intelligence when done by people. Think of recognizing faces, understanding speech, driving cars, writing sentences, answering questions, creating pictures. But even that definition contains multitudes.
And that right there is the problem. What does it mean for machines to understand speech or write a sentence? What kinds of tasks could we ask such machines to do? And how much should we trust the machines to do them?
As this technology moves from prototype to product faster and faster, these have become questions for all of us. But (spoilers!) I don’t have the answers. I can’t even tell you what AI is. The people making it don’t know what AI is either. Not really. “These are the kinds of questions that are important enough that everyone feels like they can have an opinion,” says Chris Olah, chief scientist at the San Francisco–based AI lab Anthropic. “I also think you can argue about this as much as you want and there’s no evidence that’s going to contradict you right now.”
But if you’re willing to buckle up and come for a ride, I can tell you why nobody really knows, why everybody seems to disagree, and why you’re right to care about it.
Read the entire MIT article. Link below.
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