The number one AI hype story this year had to be Tesla's robotaxi fleet. While other autonomous vehicle companies are dialing back their claims of near-future glory, Tesla has been pushing the propaganda volume up to an ear-splitting 11. Tesla has been touting its cars' "self-driving" abilities since 2016. At the end of last year, after selling "self-driving" vaporware for several years as an add-on feature, it looked like the company was going to take the responsible approach and stop selling the feature. They pulled the option from their web site, and basically stopped talking about it.

In short, modern AI technology aims to find patterns in big datasets. However, the goal of science is to not only find truths but to articulate the supporting reasons for believing them to be truths. For example, suppose we want to know how many exoplanets (planets that orbit stars other than our sun) might have life. Simple pattern-finding is, at best, a small step in this process. Basic correlations in data don't lead directly to knowledge about causation and certainly don't tell us why they exist or how to understand them.

In short, modern AI technology aims to find patterns in big datasets. However, the goal of science is to not only find truths but to articulate the supporting reasons for believing them to be truths. For example, suppose we want to know how many exoplanets (planets that orbit stars other than our sun) might have life. Simple pattern-finding is, at best, a small step in this process. Basic correlations in data don't lead directly to knowledge about causation and certainly don't tell us why they exist or how to understand them.

In an age where high-tech totalitarianism is a genuine concern, this year, Fast Company started pushing "robot rights": Before we create an AI with humanlike sophistication deserving humanlike ethical consideration, we will very likely create an AI with less-than-human sophistication, deserving some less-than-human ethical consideration. The authors suggest that eventually we will need to give AI the same protections as animals. While they admit that current AI programs are not conscious beings ("It might be a long time before we create an AI that can explain its feelings to us"), they somehow think that future AI programs might be conscious. AI programs are just that--programs. Nothing in such a program could make it conscious.