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1. Mike Mol (mikemol@pony.social)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Feb-2023 05:41:35 JST Mike Mol

   in reply to

   • jwz

   @jwz To paraphrase Arthur C. Clark, any sufficiently advanced computational technology is "AI".

   • jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Feb-2023 05:41:36 JST jwz

     The best description I've ever heard of AI is the following. I heard this in the 80s, and it has held up since:

     AI is magic.

     1: You see a magic trick. You are amazed by the magic.

     2: You are shown how the trick works. You are impressed by the technique.

     3: You learn how to perform the trick. Now it's not magic, it's sleight-of-hand, or mirrors, or misdirection.

     This is why "AI" is always bullshit: once you understand it, it's not AI any more, it's something else.

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.
   • jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 21-Feb-2023 05:41:36 JST jwz

     in reply to

     Some things that used to be AI but aren't any more:

     - production systems
     - expert systems
     - semantic networks
     - theorem provers
     - Bayesian inference
     - putting parentheses around data and calling it "knowledge"
     - computational linguistics
     - genetic algorithms
     - machine translation

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.