Yes, quite so. Technical people who are passionately interested in this stuff, often make some extremely troubling statements about it. Muggles, as one would expect, completely fail to get it.
Artificial Intelligence, as we have it today, is not really intelligence. There's not a soul or a consciousness in there. There's a machine, a computer system and program (s) that do some things one would associate with neural networks, and some to do with fuzzy-logic and some that have to do with dumb statistics.
Dumb statistics... Go buy a book, that teaches you how to play poker, and one major subject will be the odds of getting a pair, or 3 of a kind, or a flush, or a house full. Armed with a little bit of base cunning, and a good working understanding of the betting system, and a splash of cunning human psychology, AND the knowledge of how likely it is anybody else at a 4 hand table, where one has folded, and you hold a king high straight... has a hand that can beat yours...
Dumb statistics don't make you intelligent, but they do provide you with enough help to make decisions, and probably better decisions than most of the roobs you'll be playing against.
A system like this can be trained to play a complex game like Go, or Chess, better than any human player alive. But that doesn't make it intelligent. It can and it does make an extremely useful tool, which can maybe find better choices and strategies than you most of the time.
But that expertise doesn't tell you what to do if you spot a round metallic hole up the sleeve of the player opposite you. "How to win at Poker" doesn't explain Derringers. It doesn't know the house can get a "maid" in to do some housekeeping while you're up, and have her bend over and show you she isn't wearing any.... which is prone to cause some degree of distraction....
Artificial Stupidity doesn't "Understand" anything, the way a human does. It doesn't think.
It can be incredibly good at what it does, but it's nothing like "intelligence" in the way we think of it.
Now that's not to say it's no good. It is good, but it has limits. Like fire, you have to learn to use it. Like a magnet dangling from a thread, it can tell you something you otherwise wouldn't have known... But the fact you've discovered the Compass, doesn't mean you're God, and doesn't mean it's God either.... It is a very useful trick. It does make navigation easier. But, you've still got to row, and bale, and try not to capsize..... It's not the hand of God and it's not the answer to all your problems. It's a tool...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
