Josh Rothman at The New Yorker:
Many people don’t know how seriously to take A.I. It can be hard to know, both because the technology is so new and because hype gets in the way. It’s wise to resist the sales pitch simply because the future is unpredictable. But anti-hype, which emerges as a kind of immune response to boosterism, doesn’t necessarily clarify matters. In 1879, the Times ran a multipart front-page story about the light bulb, under the headline “Edison’s Electric Light—Conflicting Statements as to Its Utility.” In a section offering “a scientific view,” the paper quoted an eminent engineer—the president of the Stevens Institute of Technology—who was “protesting against the trumpeting of the result of Edison’s experiments in electric lighting as ‘a wonderful success.’ ” He wasn’t being unreasonable: inventors had been failing to construct workable light bulbs for decades. In many other instances, his anti-hype would’ve been warranted.
A.I. hype has created two kinds of anti-hype. The first holds that the technology will soon plateau: maybe A.I. will continue struggling to plan ahead, or to think in an explicitly logical, rather than intuitive, way.
more here.
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