Anti Anti Hype Case for AI
by Mridul
Five years ago, computers didn't talk. They now talk everyday to millions of people without ever flubbing a line. They write most of our code. One of them even cracked the Unit Distance problem posed by Paul Erdos which has stumped mathematicians since 1946. Where generations of geniuses failed, AI succeeded.
Yet its users, especially the more technical ones, are not sufficiently appreciative of how far we've come.
This is understandable. After all we inhabit an information landscape filled to the brim with AI hype sludge. We calibrate against this background, noticing plainly and repeatedly, that it's not all that the CEOs make it out to be.
However, this is a technology for which we have not discovered any theoretical bounds. We have not deduced a wall nearby. We don't even have the vocabulary to talk of such a wall for there is no mature science of intelligence. We have no principled reason to conjecture such a limit.
Intelligence just emerged spontaneously when we unloaded a mound of data onto a linear algebra machine and turned the crank for months. We threw tricks at it and it kept getting better. Every time we think it plateaued, it pushes right though. Nobody knows why or how it works; and nobody knows when it'll stop working.
In just a few years, we went from computers spitting out only gibberish to autonomous agents writing, testing, and deploying production-grade code.
Yet if you ask the average senior software engineer, they will have much to complain. They are not in perpetual awe. They focus on the ways it continues to be utterly stupid because such is the expectation now. And who can blame them? The hypesters have hyped it to the moon.
This along with the fact that humans quickly getting used to revolutions leads to a curious cognitive bias where you lose a sense of scale for what was achieved. We travelled over seventy years on this path towards artificial intelligence, and for most of that time, we made scant progress. In just the last couple of years we leaped over every milestone we once thought were in the distant sci-fi future. We're finally nearing the precipice.
It won't all come to a halt right here. Something big is around the corner. And we're not ready for it.