The Wages of AI is AS

I remember mentioning to Igor Aleksander -- one of the great AI pioneers and thinkers -- while I was interviewing him for Philosophy Now magazine, that for many people, AI was going to be an unexpected, shrink-wrapped, 2-for-1 deal. What was the unexpected item in the bagging area? Well, if you recognise the phrase in italics, you are probably an experienced user of supermarket self-service checkouts (probably British; feel free to provide the equivalents in French, German, etc.), where the machines seem rather too easily surprised. The extreme short-sightedness that prevents them seeing what is to us entirely foreseeable, and their inflexibility in general, leads almost inevitably to a rather one-sided dialogue concerning the shortcomings of the machine, the designer, the manufacturer, and the store operator, that can be neatly encapsulated in the simple phrase, "Stupid bloody machines!" Alas, Artificial Stupidity is as inevitable as natural stupidity, but we take natural stupidity largely for granted because we know we are all fallible. It's the perfectly ordinary consequence of having soft, squishy brains with a limited capacity for understanding anything, let alone a world we can only dimly perceive.