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Comment by jey | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't that the field called "AI" is useless, it's just that they accidentally got away with being called "AI". Without the vast body of research done under the banner of "AI" you wouldn't have OCR, speech recognition, fraud detection, search engines, ...

That said, I also don't think you need to be an expert neural network wrangler and genetic algorithms shaman if you want to study "true AI". You should however have an understanding of the fundamentals behind the techniques used in classical AI so that you can rationally dismiss them, or hell, maybe you'll even find some amazing lead or inspiration in the existing work. After all, the field of AI did start out with ambitions of creating "true AI" (whatever that is).

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When someone says "AI", I think they mean AI, not e.g. path-finding for writing a Quake bot.

Of course a real AI would be much better at all those things you mentioned anyway -- like deciding which of my e-mail messages are spam.

Or carrying on a conversation.

P.S. I'm an AI.

Not in academia. In academia, as far as I can tell, they pretty much exclusively mean narrow AI when talking about "AI". Us lay people might be thinking of HAL and Skynet when we say "AI" though. ;-)

Yes, I fully agree that a "real AI" would be able to do those things better, but my point is that we do have real practical utility from the narrow AI tradition, and their work isn't for nothing.

"When someone says "AI", I think they mean AI, not e.g. path-finding for writing a Quake bot."

Then you're hopelessly out of touch with what most people mean when they say "AI", and what the person who asked the question wants to learn about ("Learning Algorythms and Decision Making programs").

> Then you're hopelessly out of touch with what most people mean when they say "AI"

Hopeless? Doc, are you telling me there's no cure?!?

In fact, when most people talk about AI, they mean it in the sense of, "do you think computers will one day be as intelligent as humans?". Cf. the moviefilm "AI". If that kind of AI is what you wish to pursue, then the so-called field of AI isn't going to get you there.

I'm reclaiming the term AI for actual AI from the minority that's misusing it and we're having a Pride march on the 23rd. Wheel out your servers and "represent".

Well, that "minority" is essentially the same community that invented the term in the first place. It's not like what you're observing is some ghastly secret: the AI community hasn't been seriously trying to construct strong AI for 25+ years. "AI" is a bad term, and doesn't accurately describe much of the work that is done in the field -- fair enough. Considering that trying to build strong AI is a pipedream anyway (IMHO), I don't think that's such a disaster. The person asking the question was plainly talking about weak AI techniques anyway.

> the AI community hasn't been seriously trying to construct strong AI for 25+ years.

Now that's an excuse if I ever heard one. "Uhh... we weren't seriously trying... uhh..."

That's also why I'm not dating Natalie Portman!

> Considering that trying to build strong AI is a pipedream anyway (IMHO)

That's hilarious. Heavier-than-air flying machines, a man on the Moon, sending pictures through invisible AIRWAVES?!? Pipe dreams!

"I'm reclaiming the term AI for actual AI ..."

Those people have mostly switched to using the term "Artificial General Intelligence" when describing "actual AI".

"Artificial General Intelligence"

Never heard that term before.

And to quote Office Space: "Why should I change my name, he is the one who sucks". So personally I won't adapt "Artificial General Intelligence" into my vocabulary.

Some punk-ass bitches from MIT?

The rest of the world just says AI. It's like a million to one, we win. Don't make me have to call M.C. Hawking.

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