At dinner this evening with a really interesting group of people, the topic came up of Artificial Intelligence. One of our party asked “So when will C3PO take over from us humans?”<\/p>\n
I happened to be the only computer scientist at the table, so it fell upon me to push back against the premise underlying this question. I tried to articulate the difference between the fantasy of A.I. in popular culture and the reality of A.I. as it actually exists.<\/p>\n
I fully acknowledge the psychological power of our collective dystopian fantasy of A.I. It didn’t start with Skynet<\/i> and Ex Machina<\/i>. We’ve had Frankenstein’s creature, the Golem and Prometheus.<\/p>\n
But the reality of A.I. has nothing to do with that. Computers can do a pretty good job of creating a simulacrum of human behavior, but that is very different from human behavior itself.<\/p>\n
By analogy, you can record a human voice with a tape recorder and listen to the playback, but that’s not the same as listening to a human singer. Imitation is not the same as equivalence.<\/p>\n
Maybe none of this matters. The fact that millions of people are embracing a fantasy about some pop-culture construct of A.I. really has nothing to do with the actual state of A.I. <\/p>\n
But it’s still kind of weird.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At dinner this evening with a really interesting group of people, the topic came up of Artificial Intelligence. One of our party asked “So when will C3PO take over from us humans?” I happened to be the only computer scientist at the table, so it fell upon me to push back against the premise underlying … Continue reading “AI vs I”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19492"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19492"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19494,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19492\/revisions\/19494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}