So-called "AI"
El Reg, by comparison with ordinary, mostly dunder-headed news outlets, actually knows enough to be perfectly well aware that there is not yet any such thing as "Artificial Intelligence"—unless the meaning of the word "intelligence" is cut back to its smallest conceivable level ... as in, say, "the intelligence of the US president", where we would expect it to be equivalent to that of yesterday's roadkill.
So perhaps the Reg has a duty, as a responsible organ, to style the term as "AI" in quotes, or better still to write: "so-called 'AI'".
The term is so completely misused that it has lost any meaning. All the world's supercomputers standing in a line still cannot simulate in real time the mind of a Staffordshire Bull Terrier: the idea that so-called 'AI' usefully exists in Google, Facebook, Fort Meade, your phone, toothbrush or iShite, is a completely ridiculous con for the absurdly gullible and uninformed. Complicated algorithms can process photos and sounds, and do some impressive things in other extremely circumscribed, rules-based, confected environments, like playing Go—but not one of them could hold a worthwhile, convincing, wide-ranging and empathetic conversation with you.
Training a computer the size of a garage with several hundred cores to trawl through twenty petabytes of data using terabytes of RAM to manage something previously achieved by the litre of blue jelly inside my head is impressive—in computer terms.
In terms of the incredible versatility of a human brain ... meh, it doesn't even shift the needle.
So take a deep breath, Reg, and help to inoculate the world against this constant diarrhoea of marketing nonsense. It is not AI. There is no AI. There won't be any AI for another decade or two. There's just big computers with lots of data, doing a few very, very specific things really fast. There is only "so-called 'AI'".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
