On the need of discussing about AI
So, I’ve been reading some articles and having some “weird" discussions while on holidays about AI. The main interest was whether a judgement day is coming, what’s going on with the Skynet, what do I think of Terminator and the rise of the machines in general. There’s so much hype, but the potential opportunities and benefits of AI are still under-hyped. And the media tends to focus on the fears associated with AI rather than on the benefits.
In addition, it seems that the majority of people confuses AI with general intelligence. Although the AI community is small, and it’s most important subfield (in my opinion), machine learning is also small, there are lots of AI applications that work pretty good in everyday systems. The problem is that AI algorithms in general are focused on a very specific task, i.e. a chess playing algorithm cannot drive your car. Another issue to consider is probably that the platform ecosystem is immature, in the sense that existing platforms are mainly targeted at data scientists, researchers and experimentalists. Thus, businesses may hesitate to adopt AI solutions, although imperfect solutions can still achieve significant business value.
Evidently, AI algorithms are being used nowadays. AI applications do exist and AI in general is not a concept of the far future. Perhaps we are some years away from general intelligence, autonomous robots, etc., but AI is definitely in our lives right now. The point is that there is a lot of noise regarding AI but there’s been a lack of in-depth discussion and analysis of whether businesses will adopt it, how it’s actually going to transform them and whether/how and under which ethics and morality we will reach general intelligence down the line.