GoKawiilYesterday at lunch a friend asked me what tech trend he should pay attention to but was probably ignoring.
Without thinking much I said “artificial intelligence”, but having thought about that a bit more, I think it’s probably right.
To be clear, AI (under the common scientific definition) likely won’t work. You can say that about any new technology, and it’s a generally correct statement. But I think most people are far too pessimistic about its chances - AI has not worked for so long that it’s acquired a bad reputation. CS professors mention it with a smirk. Neural networks failed the first time around, the logic goes, and so they won’t work this time either.
But artificial general intelligence might work, and if it does, it will be the biggest development in technology ever.
I’d argue we’ve gotten closer in lots of specific domains - for example, computers are now better than humans at lots of impressive things like playing chess and flying airplanes. But rather than call these examples of AIs, we just say that they weren’t really that hard in the first place. And to be fair, none of these really feel anything like a computer that can think like a human.
There are a number of private (or recently acquired) companies, plus some large public ones, that are making impressive progress towards artificial general intelligence, but the good ones are very secretive about it.
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