I was thinking about why I find articles like this, and really the term “artificial intelligence” so dangerously mystical-sounding and over above the hype factor, I think it’s because the term “intelligence” is kind of mystical-sounding.

In day-to-day ML work one speaks of a model having such performance on a “task” (I think psychologists and others might use this term as well). Classifying digits on the MNIST dataset is a famous “hello world” task, generating competitive moves in a game of Go is anything but “hello world”, but still a measurable task.

Some tasks (certain kinds of image recognition, generating competitive moves in Chess or Go) are done better by machines now, albeit on very un-competitive energy budgets.

But this has been true since the earliest days of computing. Computers have been better at arithmetic since practically the very beginning. Is that “artificial intelligence”? We call little kids “smart” when they perform well on arithmetic and remembering stuff.

To sort of paraphrase that famous Anthony Hopkins scene from Westworld: there is no line where the sum total of “high” performance on a bunch of tasks makes something intelligent, or sentient, or conscious.

I know a lot of people find this depressing or even nihilistic. I personally find it clarifying, like the unification of electric and magnetic forces.

It’s all just so much simpler if the human brain is orbiting the Sun and not vice-versa.