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You're not 100% wrong, but I'm not trying to shut down an entire idea of AI.

Let me put it this way: It's called AI, Artificial intelligence. Are trees inteligent?

Because they are a clump of cells that manage to achieve amazing results. growing to be some of the largest living things on the planet. Extracting nutrients and transporting them 20 or more meters above ground, where they are used to harvest energy from the sun, all the while producing offspring every year and fighting off predators.

I don't think many people would call them "natural intelligence".

The I admit that I maybe apply a narrow definition of "intelligence", but I think the core concept is one of "understanding". And we are not even close to al ML algo actually understanding anything.

And this is the problem. It masks the inherent shortcommings of ML. People are delivered the impression that applications that use ML actually do what they are expected to do, because like a person, you train them and then they understand their job and do it.

This is NOT HOW THAT WORKS. The ML algo does not understand that it is asked to identify oncoming traffic. It does not know that it is looking a cancer cells that will soon kill someone.

And even worse, we humans who make these things, are 100% unable to understand the models we create. We can feed them data, and compare the result. But that is it. There is no real way to understand how it works in detail.

They get used anyway. With predictable results. see Tesla Autopilot for a prominent example.

Also, I call them AI researchers for the same reason I call Nuclear Fusion researchers that, not because they are doing it, but because they are researching it.




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