AI’s Destiny Was Never Intelligence
Only when AI became useful did it become attractive
AI’s original purpose was to imbue machines with intelligence. It was doomed from the start. Not because of the sheer complexity of the quest, but because it was inevitable that we’d get distracted—and attracted—by a more enticing prize.
Writer Tiernan Ray has recently argued in an illuminating article on ZDNet that “the industrialization of AI is shifting the focus from intelligence to achievement.”
He writes:
“If AI increasingly gets stuff done, in biology, in physics, in business, in logistics, in marketing, and in warfare, and as society becomes comfortable with it, there may be fewer and fewer people who even care to ask, But is it intelligent?”
Since 2012 (and long before), any system associated with the “AI” label matches Ray’s description of “industrial AI,” as he calls it.
From early deep learning (DL)-based computer vision systems like CNNs for object detection and recognition, to recommender systems that power …