Media
Why does artificial intelligence scare us so much?
When people see machines that respond like humans, or computers that perform feats of strategy and cognition mimicking human ingenuity, they sometimes joke about a future in which humanity will need to accept robot overlords. But buried in the joke is a seed of unease. Science-fiction writing and popular movies, from "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) to "Avengers: Age of Ultron" (2015), have speculated about artificial intelligence (AI) that exceeds the expectations of its creators and escapes their control, eventually outcompeting and enslaving humans or targeting them for extinction. Conflict between humans and AI is front and center in AMC's sci-fi series "Humans," which returned for its third season on Tuesday (June 5). In the new episodes, conscious synthetic humans face hostile people who treat them with suspicion, fear and hatred.
From AI to ML to AI: On Swirling Nomenclature & Slurried Thought
Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we work (Venture Beat), turning all of us into hyper-productive business centaurs (The Next Web). Artificial intelligence will merge with human brains to transform the way we think (The Verge). Artificial intelligence is the new electricity (Andrew Ng). Within five years, artificial intelligence will be behind your every decision (Gene Rommety of IBM via Computer World). Before committing all future posts to the coming revolution, or abandoning the blog altogether to beseech good favor from our AI overlords at the AI church, perhaps we should ask, why are today's headlines, startups and even academic institutions suddenly all embracing the term artificial intelligence (AI)?
A Very Short History Of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
In an expanded edition published in 1988, they responded to claims that their 1969 conclusions significantly reduced funding for neural network research: "Our version is that progress had already come to a virtual halt because of the lack of adequate basic theories… by the mid-1960s there had been a great many experiments with perceptrons, but no one had been able to explain why they were able to recognize certain kinds of patterns and not others."