It’s really getting hyped, even a recent article in the register where one of the resident wanks went to parliament to discuss it, and of course they all get it utterly, utterly, utterly, wrong.
1/ define AI
First off we should really define AI, and I can save you and me 50,000 words by saying that nothing in the pipeline, nothing in production or development, and nothing on the horizon even comes close.
AI just means a created intelligence as opposed to a naturally occurring one, and one of the most humble tasks any biological, natural, intelligence does is locomotion, so we are down to driverless cars again, except, no, we are not, because while the odd elephant gets stuck in a waterhole and the odd lemming runs off a cliff, 99.9999% of the time all motions are 100 autonomous, including deciding which direction to go, when to refuel, when to rest, etc.
Tesla autopilot does well on certain roads, but no animal does well on roads because it is an arbitrary artificial experience, autopilot soon fails when things get out of bounds, and it is easy to make things go out of bounds, but these same things that make tesla autopilot barf make the roads more natural and more navigable for animals, eg natural intelligence.
So you want an AI to walk from here to aberdeen, but you want a dumb software robot to ride the rails from here to aberdeen.
If an external agent can sit there and “tell” the AI to get these parcels delivered prior to 12:30 when partial refunds have to be made, then the AI ain’t an AI…. the man in the van does it because he doesn’t get paid for delivering parcels that are late, and he needs money to live, that’s an example of an intelligent being, being treated like a robot, but intelligence = risk / reward and decision making.
Nobody actually wants that, nobody actually wants to get in johnnycab and say “the railway station” and johnnycab takes you to the sewerage works, because johnnycab wants a break and a charge and the power is cheaper down there today, fuck you and what you want… you’ll pay more in an hour for a last minute dash to the station
So, ergo, nobody is actually taking about AI.
They are talking about robotics and automation.
The two subjects aren’t even remotely related, but hey ho.
Tesla autopilot is robotics and automation.
In robotics and automation you do not want “intelligence” at all in any way shape or form, what you want is a series of “bounds checking” boxes, no, I cannot rotate my 6th axis 120 degrees, well, I *could*, but if I do the 120 cm long light saber I am holding in my gripper will slice be in two between axis 1 and 2…
Some folks know this shit as a CNC crash…
I got all kinds of software here, some of it is fairly high end and specialist, and I used to work in IT, and you know what I have never seen?
I have never seen software that I cannot trivially and repeatably crash.
Most of it trivially, so trivially that just attempting to open or load a very large file kills it, I can kill every single separate piece of laser control software that I own to control my lasers by attempting to load a 425 megabyte DXF file, I have the exact same file also as a 220 meg ai and 911 meg tiff original, hell, illustrator 64 bit doesn’t crash, but it won’t load it, on a 64 bit machine with 32 gigs of quad channel ram and all ssd…
So we introduce bounds checking, I’m sorry dave, I can’t do that…
So now we have kuka and fanuc workplace robots that check if the dumb human has put their hand between the gripper and the part the robot wants to pick up, and this forms the trade demo, I’m offered coffee and ushered around to the rear of the stand when I start muttering about clingfilm or 100 lb nylon fishing line… prace bets now that the bounds checking will neither look for it nor see it…
2/ having defined AI, we see that it isn’t even on the horizon, so all we are really talking about is big data and bounds checking.
Asimov has a lot to answer for, and so does every other scifi writer who came along and started doing robot stories, or AI stories, or robot AI stories, because everyone thinks they know what they are talking about, and they don’t, especially the so called fucking experts.
My new brother laser printer is a robot, bounds checking and environmental controls means it is pretty flexible, 180 gsm A4 or 22 gsm A5 makes no odds, it can feed em all from within it’s own controller environment, 4 oz of contact adhesive added to the lower paper tray, not so much… but barring malice or stupidity, it’s pretty much there as far as unattended service.
The problem is like the contact adhesive in the paper tray, it’s much easier to break systems that depend on bounds checking than it is to add yet another patch to cover yet another exploit or weakness, because after all the whole purpose of bounds checking is to limit options to a known and fixed finite set.
Fuckbook knowing that secretly you like to suck cock at the gloryhole at the blue oyster club is NOT anything to do with AI or anything else, it’s just big data number crunching and statistical analysis, the fuckbook app you never use on your smartphone that was preinstalled with the os know about contact lists and cell tower ID and triangulation, it’s forensics, no more and no less.
Too bad if you do not actually go to the blue oyster, you use the entrance from other other side of the block to go to the 1st floor premises same time every week to buy your ounce of grass, or to watch football with the lads, or to have acupuncture.. hell I know a guy who checks into the same motel every two weeks on a saturday afternoon to soak in the bath for a couple of hours, he only has a shower at home… (he actually gets a hugely reduced rate in exchange because he is always gone by 5pm)
I don’t have a problem with fuckbook sucking everything up and determining that the guy I know sucks cock in a motel room every other saturday, I *do* have a problem with anyone who reads that metadata on a computer screen and assumes it is the truth, because they read it on a computer screen.
3/ the real issue
I did once find myself in a place analagous to the el reg twat, discussing the same subject, I was given the bum’s rush when I asked them to first define intelligence, and queried their first response, that clearly we are all intelligent, by saying prove it, I see no sign of intellect here, I see people sifting through jigsaw pieces trying to find the right pieces to build the picture they have already formed.
By far the best quote / example I have ever heard came from the fanuc tech guy who was only there so the robots performed as expected for the sales droids out front, his pet wish was one of the mate series, with a gripper and a tool tray that held a dildo and a knife and a cactus, just get the cunt who thought they were even qualified to hold an opinion on robotics or automation or even AI and strap them down in front of the mate, if they are right all they get is a gentle sensuous anal probing with the dildo, if anyone else can freak the bounds checking they get a cactus or knife inserted randomly at 500 mm/sec with around 50 kg of force.