I was interested to see that blowhard Richard Carrier has commented very abrasively on the subject of AI. See here:
AI Is Garbage and a Bubble (Please Learn This) • Richard Carrier Blogs
Hahaha, Richard I like it! I've only skimmed over his article but my guess is that he's probably got some worthy points there. We have to factor in, however, that he has a tendency to blow hard on stuff he doesn't like. That is very much a Richard Carrier trait.
It is likely that the biggest problem with AI is that it's over hyped. At least part of reason for this, I'd tender, is a result of chatbot behavior which gives every impression of a talking, walking sentience; humans have a deep instinct that if it talks and walks like a duck then its a duck. Talking in particular is very convincing of the presence of sentience. But that's like a primitive person unaware of our hi-tech times looking in our very perfect mirrors or listening to a perfect recording and concluding he's seeing or hearing a real human there and then; it's a very natural and understandable knee-jerk reaction to conclude that such are evidence of the immediate presence of a sentient being.
But chatbots are only another human-computer interface. It is chatbot's very human like language interface which is fooling a lot of people and if the investment bubble bursts we could be in for some trouble. But then are things as bad as Richard says? He's well known for being a blowhard and he may well be blowing just a little too hard here (again).
The quasi human interface which Chatbots provide is impressive and can give the impression we are talking to an entity which is super-intelligent. But then using SQL (Structured Query Language) to interrogate a big database can also be very impressive. I regard AI language models as a step (perhaps quite a few steps in fact!) beyond SQL. I personally would want to congratulate the AI research community on providing us with a natural language interface to knowledge and information. Thanks and Well done; you deserve an accolade of two. I have some appreciation about how AI works after my involvement on The Thinknet Project. That involvement started in the 1980s (but later morphed into a project in Quantum Mechanics).
In creating AI based on the human thinking* model it is a fairly sound inference that it is going to be very, very fallible; after all humans are very epistemically fallible; in fact ask Richard himself just what he thinks of the fallible conclusions of many of his fellow humans on whom he has been known to blow very hard. However, although likely overstated his post is worth a read especially by some of those rich CEOs who don't understand what they are dealing with. It might sober them up a bit on the subject.
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