AI

 

They All Laughed

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus
When he said the world was round
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother
When they said that man could fly
They told Marconi
Wireless was a phony

Is AI a laughing matter?

AI is no different than: a written alphabet, the printing press, a camera, or copy and paste.  Each of these were accompanied by social upheavals, so why should we expect AI to be any different. AI is a tool invented by humans to make it easier to tell, process, and preserve stories.

But as a tool it is perhaps misnamed.  IMHO, it should be Artificial INFERENCE, not Artificial INTELLIGENCE.  It is only making inferences from the data that it processes, and it is only as intelligent as those who wrote the algorithms in the AI to do that processing.

So what is the difference between an inference and intelligence?

Before Copernicus, it was inferred that the Sun and the planets revolved about the Earth.

Before Kepler, it was inferred that the planetary orbits were perfect circles, not imperfect ellipses.

Before Wegner, it was inferred that the continents did not drift and that what we observed were the fixed position of the continents.

Before Darwin, it was inferred that life was created and while evolution can destroy species but it can not change them.

Before Einstein, it was inferred that the speed of light could be exceeded.

In each of these and other instances, INTELLIGENCE only means OBSERVATIONS, as in military intelligence, not that the observations, or the inferences from those observations, were intelligent and correct.

And because AI is an inference from observations, anything that was not observed is NOT part of the AI.  If there is confidential or copyrighted information that is being observed, then those inferences otherwise might be theft/a security breach/copyright infringement.  If that protected information, or any information, is being excluded from an AI, it does not mean that it did not happen, just that it was not observed and considered by that AI.

It is important to remember each of these when using AI so that people will be laughing with you and not at you.