For months, my colleague Will Douglas Heaven has been trying to dig in to understand why everyone seems to disagree about what exactly AI is, why no one even knows, and why you’re right to care about it. He was talking to some of the biggest thinkers in the field, asking them simply: What is artificial intelligence? It’s a great piece that looks at the past and present of artificial intelligence to see where it’s going next. You can read it here.
Here’s a taste of what to expect:
Artificial intelligence was hardly called “artificial intelligence” at all. Computer scientist John McCarthy is credited with coining the term in 1955 when he wrote a funding application for a summer research program at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. But more than one of McCarthy’s colleagues hated it. “The word ‘artificial’ makes you think there’s something fake about it,” said one. Others preferred the terms “automata studies,” “complex information processing,” “engineering psychology,” “applied epistemology,” “neural cybernetics,” “non-numerical computation,” “neurodynamics,” “advanced automatic programming,” and “hypothetical automata. ” Not as cool and sexy as AI.
Artificial intelligence has quite a few fanatical fans. Artificial intelligence has partners, with a belief in the technology’s current power and inevitable future improvement. The crowded popular narrative is shaped by a pantheon of well-known players, from Big Tech marketing chiefs like Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella to industry pioneers like Elon Musk and Sam Altman to famous computer scientists like Geoffrey Hinton. As the hype for artificial intelligence has grown, a vocal anti-hype lobby has risen in opposition, ready to quash its ambitious, often wild claims. As a result, it can feel like different camps are talking side by side, not always in good faith.
This sometimes seemingly ridiculous discussion has huge implications that affect us all. Artificial intelligence has very large egos and huge sums of money at stake. But more than that, these disagreements matter when industry leaders and scientists are called upon by heads of state and lawmakers to explain what this technology is and what it can do (and how scared we are). They matter when this technology is integrated into the software we use every day, from search engines to word processing apps to assistants on your phone. AI is not going away. But if we don’t know what they’re selling us, who’s the fool?
For example, meet the TESCREAlists. A clumsy acronym (pronounced “tes-cree-all”) replaces an even weightier list of labels: transhumanism, extroversionism, particularism, cosmism, rationalism, efficient altruism, and long-termism. It was coined by Timnit Gebru, who founded the Distributed AI Research Institute and was the former co-head of ethical AI at Google, and Émile Torres, a philosopher and historian at Case Western Reserve University. Some anticipate human immortality. others envision the colonization of the stars by humanity. The common principle is that an all-powerful technology is not only possible but inevitable. TESCREALists believe that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, could not only fix the world’s problems but improve humanity. Gebru and Torres link several of these worldviews—with their common focus on the “improvement” of humanity—to the racist eugenics movements of the 20th century.
Is AI math or magic? Either way, people have strong, almost religious beliefs about one or the other. “It’s offensive to some people to suggest that human intelligence could be recreated through these kinds of mechanisms,” Ellie Pavlick, who studies neural networks at Brown University, told Will. “People have strong beliefs about this subject – it almost feels religious. On the other hand, there are people who have a bit of a God complex. So it’s also insulting for them to suggest that they just can’t do it.”
Will’s piece is really the definitive look at this entire debate. No spoilers – no easy answers, but lots of fascinating characters and viewpoints. I’d recommend you read the whole thing here — and see if you can decide what AI really is.