The BS-Industrial Complex of Phony A.I.

I can attest. while doing research in a T1 university, all the professors were mildly disgusted by the hype pushed out by startups, and even Google's own internal marketing department.

Nonetheless they too are minting the same nonsense in the "introduction" part of academic research, it's a clear case of everyone is playing the game, so "I have to play or be left behind."

These types of AI promotion seem to be a sort of cop-out that suggest we all look forward to a hands-off future where computers will be able to do everything for us.

Then human minds will be allocated away from thoughtful interaction with their environment and into an all-hands-on-deck scenario where neural net operations are given top priority so they can churn out some answers.

> The technologists know it’s bullshit. Fed up with the fog that marketers have created, they’ve simply ditched A.I. and moved on to a new term called “artificial general intelligence.”

Not to detract from an otherwise excellent BS takedown, but unfortunately the author fails to mention that there’s a non-zero possibility that AGI itself is merely taking the bullshit to the next level.

It continues to astound me how some technologists actually believe AGI is not just inevitable but around the corner. When to my naive perspective (as a machine learning rank amateur but with several decades experience as a professional human being) all I see is machines that can do some form of pattern recognition, but nothing resembling the common sense that the words “general intelligence” seemed to indicate at one point.

Minor quibbles about truth and meaning of words aside, I have to support any article that skewers the soft underbelly of the phony AI ecosystem as effectively as this one does.

Progress of civilization could be summarized in the slow march of BS elimination parallel with the creation of creative new forms of BS (people don't actually learn anything, they just form the same crazy opinions about something new)

Strikeout "of Phony AI." The BS-Industrial Complex is huge and the rise of the Internet has made it worse by empowering the less-informed to share ideas. That is somewhat the price you pay for progress.

The hopeful idealistic information superhighway myth of the 90s turned into something else.