AI is everywhere. It’s getting incorporated into everything. That’s simply progress, we’re told. And therefore we need to embrace it, lest we look like a Luddite and let China win (whatever that means). Yet, simultaneously, a lot of people also are afraid because of AI. Very afraid. And sometimes, we’re told that we should be afraid too. However, in public discourse surrounding AI, there often can be a lack of detail regarding what specifically we’re supposed to be afraid of. Sometimes it is not even clear what is meant by the term “AI.”
Technically speaking, as I have touched on previously, one could argue (as some older computer scientists do) that AI is an umbrella term for a family of algorithms based in math that sometimes dates back more than a half-century.
Practically speaking, numerous programs we’ve been living with for years like Google Maps and Amazon’s recommender system can be thought of as AI despite their lack of novelty. Yet, in public discourse, the term AI tends to refer to generative AI (e.g, ChatGPT), as well as any number of hypothetical future programs that will do everything humans can do but better, will therefore both solve all our problems while also putting most of us out of work, and also eventually just might decide to go full Skynet on us unless they decide that we’re not worth the trouble.
(Sounds pretty sexy. Perhaps someone should make a series of movies about it. Perhaps people will even like two out of five of them.)
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