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Monday, February 06, 2012

Simple Answers to Serious Futurological Questions

Asks one Patrick Tucker (Robot Cultist, Dean Martin Impersonator? You decide.), “Will Artificial Intelligence Be America’s Next Big Thing?”

And the answer is: No, Patrick. No, it will not.

You can be sure, however, that marketing executives on the grift, that techno-fetishistic fanboys waving plastic swords at sci-fi conventions (who are, by the way, awesome), and that also, of course, Very Serious Futurologists just like you in their best pundit-drag, whomping up military-industrial enthusiasm for the masses in content-free pop-tech articles and breathless filler segments on news networks, will all continue to attribute “intelligence” to non-intelligent software and artifacts. But, then, that’s a very old, very tired schtick and not in any way “Next” or “Big” or even a “Thing” -- to the extent that by "things" we mean things that actually exist -- is it, now, Patrick?

2 comments:

Chad Lott said...

I thought they already invented AI, for like a washing machine or something.

jimf said...

> I thought they already invented AI, for like a washing machine or something.

Come to think, in the "Book of the Machines" section of Samuel Butler's
_Erewhon_, the Erewhonians decide that the cutoff point for restraining
runaway machine evolution (this was published in 1872, remember)
lay with a certain kind of "washerwoman's mangle" (a "mangle" is what,
in electrical-powered washing machines, is called the "agitator" ;-> ).

(See also the "Butlerian Jihad" in Frank Herbert's _Dune_. ;-> )