What is AI? Stephen Hanson in conversation with Michael Jordan

In the first instalment of this new video series, Stephen José Hanson talks to Michael I Jordan, about AI as an engineering discipline, what people call AI, so-called autonomous cars, and more. To provide some background to this discussion, in 2018, Jordan published an essay on Medium entitled Artificial intelligence -- the revolution hasn't happened yet, in which he argues that we need to tone down the hype surrounding AI and develop the field as a human-centric engineering discipline. He adds further commentary on this topic in an interview published this year in IEEE spectrum, (Stop calling everything AI). Hanson wrote a rebuttal to the Medium article, AI: Nope, the revolution is here and this time it is the real thing, and the pair discuss the theme in more detail in this video discussion below. There is also a full transcript of the discussion below. This interchange was recorded on June 15th 2021. HANSON: Hi Michael, good to see you! So let's get into this. Let me just state what I think you said and you tell me where I'm wrong, if I am. So it appears to me that you're basically talking about that AI should arise from an engineering discipline that with start from well-defined science like chemistry and chemical engineering and this would allow the insights from the science to migrate their way into an engineering domain which had principles of design and control and risk management and many other good statistical quality control ideas that basically made AI the valuable and useful and have some utility and something actually went to calculate about the AI I actually being useful as opposed to the number hidden units it has…. JORDAN: Just to slow you down a little bit there, I mean historically I think the good points of reference or things like the development of chemical engineering or electrical engineering were that there was an existing science and understanding and there was an appetite to build real-world systems that have huge implications for human life. So chemical factories didn't exist initially, but when they started to exist, I don't think it was that the science was all worked out and they kind of applied it and it just happened.