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1. 𒀭𒂗𒆠 ENKI ][e (enkiv2@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Thursday, 19-Jan-2023 11:54:20 JST 𒀭𒂗𒆠 ENKI ][e

   in reply to

   • Adi Robertson

   @thedextriarchy
   It's a direct side effect of the political struggle between the statistical/fuzzy side & the symbolic/GOFAI side of AI research.

   Minsky shat on perceptrons in the 60s so from then until the 90s when backprop got really good for computer vision, all pop culture depictions of AI were influenced by expert system research (with the exception of stuff like Deadly Friend).

   But backprop made neural nets more useful, & in the 90s they were getting to the point where they could run on commodity hardware; meanwhile, high-profile symbolic logic projects like cyc were failing. So statistical methods got a lot of hype.

   Thing about statistical methods is they can't do reasoning except by poorly and expensively simulating reasoning they've observed somebody else do (which is why human beings are so bad at it), and the statistical simulations of reasoning are so overcomplicated that nobody can understand them. In other words, statistical methods are *only* really good for bullshit!

   Technical people have known this forever -- it's obvious from first principles -- but pop culture is slow to catch up because pop culture is primarily shaped by writers half-listening to marketing people who half-listened to technical people 20 years ago.

   • Adi Robertson (thedextriarchy@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 19-Jan-2023 11:54:21 JST Adi Robertson

     It’s very funny to me that the dominant Twentieth Century conception of AI was a slightly awkward nerd with an inhuman mastery of facts and logic, when what we actually got is smooth-talking bullshit artists who can’t do eighth-grade math.

     Adrian Cochrane repeated this.