> Aircraft are often automated for most of their flight without AI.

What do you mean? I can just as easily say that Claude Code operates "without AI". It would make about as much sense.

look, there's a lot of room to complain about moving the goalposts of what counts as AI, I get it

but I don't think a simple PID controller in the autopilotnmanaging altitude, heading, and the like has ever been categorized as "AI." Cybernetics, maybe.

even the rules managing the flight envelope and MCAS on the 737 Max, or the Airbus implementations of flight law, sure seem to have relatively few of the attributes that tend to get the label these days

It means you are out here autonomously dropping logical fallacies.

Autopilots are autonomous, without AI. lane following and collision avoidance in most cars, don't use "AI" they use classic computer vision and good old fashioned radar.

The difference here is that claude code fails to perform what it's intended to do without a model attached, a plane/car doesn't.

Classical Computer Vision is AI. Computer Vision is a subfield of AI since the beginning.

People may confuse AI with Machine Learning. “Classical” computer vision generally means non-learning based techniques. But ML is also not new to computer vision. So non-classical actually means using Deep Learning.

So today when people say AI they actually mean Deep Learning.

Computer vision is not AI? This is complete news to me.

You could also say that a human is just a bunch of atoms.

Thankfully, courts will look at it differently.

After staring at your comment for a while I think what's happened is you've confused the non-AI autopilot and flight control systems used in an airliner with the AI-driven autonomy being used in military drones.

GP's point is that the goalposts of what counts as "AI" have been constantly shifted for decades, and right not it seems that even many HN commenters seem to have somehow gotten the idea that "AI" strictly means "deep learning neural networks" (or something even more specific like "generative transformers"). GP just went a bit too far in the opposite direction, being too inclusive in their definition.

FWIW, my working definition of "AI" is "anything discussed in the latest edition of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach". It seems to work well.

> GP just went a bit too far in the opposite direction, being too inclusive in their definition.

> FWIW, my working definition of "AI" is "anything discussed in the latest edition of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach". It seems to work well.

You're kidding, right? It's never been an obscure term. If a computer is making decisions, that's AI.

Here's a pretty common usage: https://www.reddit.com/r/broodwar/comments/ixzwl4/are_there_...

> I'm getting back into [Starcraft: ] Brood War after a long break. Don't have the time to play ladder, but want to be able to play 1v1 against AI, however, the stock AI in remastered is terrible

Game AI is invariably called by that term and generally implemented as a fairly simple if-else ladder. In a taxonomy I guess it would be called an "expert system"; I can find them mentioned in the detailed table of contents to AIMA (3rd edition), but not in the simplified table of contents to AIMA (4th). They might still be in there, in the same section titled "Making Simple Decisions". Norvig doesn't really bother to consider expert systems with probabilities constrained to 1 or 0, though.

No, I’m not kidding when I say that some people even in this thread are claiming that AI = DLNNs, essentially.

The fact this thread descended into a load of philosophical chin stroking about what is truly AI perfectly illustrates the core point that all regulation should just be targeted at use cases and what people are doing with the software.

If a plane could run on some sort of local LLM it should still be governed by the same laws and damages when something goes wrong same as people don't spend time quibbling about the implementation language of software they care about demonstrating capabilities.

Autopilots perceive the environment, reason, plan and execute actions. Autopilots are AI.

In the academic definition of AI (which includes things like pathfinding with A* or Djikstra's algorithm) autopilots are definitely AI.

The popular definition of AI seems to shift every couple of years to follow hype cycles. Chess computers used to be AI (and fit your definition), now they are not. Not sure if Resnet is still AI today, or if autopilots still qualify

Most autopilots don't involve reasoning and planning. In fact, autopilots predate digital computers. The first ones were developed prior to WW1.

If a basic heading hold PID loop is AI so is a thermostat from 1990. At which point the word is so meaningless it is obviously a useless definition.

Ofcourse they do reasoning and planning, it's entirely encoded in software ofcourse, but modern autopilots don't just hold a course, they perform maneuvers and follow waypoints the process of turning the objective turn 35 degrees to actuator inputs is reasoning and planning.

AI is not magic it's software, the definition is far from pointless, google maps giving you a route to your destination is AI.

My recipe book has 300 AIs and all are delicious. Google Maps running A* or whatever is obviously not AI. Come on.

You can’t say to an autopilot “create an excel spreadsheet of the current vectors and conditions and upload it to google docs”.

You can't say that to an mri machine that detects and highlights tumors. You can't say it to jev either, nor googles spam filters. But all these are built in the same way as any LLM. The term AI is not restricted to chat based LLMs.

None of that applies to autopilots though and it’s disingenuous for anyone to say that an autopilot is an AI rather than an automated system designed for a very specific task.

An autopilot is cybernetic without being intelligent.

Read wongsarus comment above.

That is neither a sufficient nor necessary condition for something to be AI.

I was giving a framing around its complete lack of generality or intelligence. Rather than contemporary definitions of AI shifting, what is being shown is that previous definitions of AI were misapplied in the hope that the field might bootstrap itself into existence, which it’s done.

As I’ve said elsewhere - an autopilot is cybernetic, it responds to inputs and stimulus in data but it doesn’t possess anything we’d now regard as falling under intelligence because it’s a strictly coded deterministic system and designed for it’s specific environment. I couldn’t take the autopilot from a Boeing and put it into an Airbus and hope for any kind of useful result. I could take a human pilot trained on a Boeing and put them in an Airbus or a Cessna, and if push came to shove in an emergency, they could probably do a decent job of getting the thing pointed in the right direction and landed on the ground.

i think you might accidentally be conflating an algorithm with the colloquial use of ai.