My grandmother was a child in 1940. Despite hours of patient explanation, she has absolutely no comprehension of what I do all day. I sit at a computer, I type some gobbledegook and inexplicably get paid for it. Everything else is a complete mystery. She just doesn't get the fundamental concept of general-purpose computing - that the same physical object can do infinitely many things. To her, the little glass rectangles that I stare at might as well be enchanted amulets.
We occupy the same physical space, but we live in completely different worlds. I can summon a chauffeur-driven car or a hot meal with a few taps on my magic rectangle. A genie in my pocket can answer seemingly impossible questions when I utter the magical incantation "OK Google...". In the eyes of my grandmother, my $200 glass rectangle makes me practically a warlock.
I can imagine a Sumerian sage in 2017 BCE remarking "apart from our obsession with little clay tablets, our society has changed little in a millennium". It might be easy from that perspective to dismiss literacy as a trivial fad; from our perspective, it is easy to take literacy for granted and overlook the transformative impact it has had on our society.
Weak AI is already here and already changing the world, it just suffers from a fundamental perceptual problem - AI that works is just software and software is boring. For decades, playing chess was seen as a grand challenge for AI. After Deep Blue's defeat of Kasparov, chess AI had become merely chess software. Our attitudes flipped almost instantaneously from "of course a computer can't beat a human at something as complex as chess" to "of course a computer can beat a human at something as simple as chess".
Google Search isn't AI, it's just an algorithm. Fully autonomous cars will stop being AI the first time you fall asleep at the wheel and wake up at your destination. Wolfram Alpha isn't AI, Siri isn't AI, content-aware fill isn't AI, Amazon's stock control system isn't AI. IBM Watson is briefly AI when it's winning a gameshow, then quickly reverts to being software.
We occupy the same physical space, but we live in completely different worlds. I can summon a chauffeur-driven car or a hot meal with a few taps on my magic rectangle. A genie in my pocket can answer seemingly impossible questions when I utter the magical incantation "OK Google...". In the eyes of my grandmother, my $200 glass rectangle makes me practically a warlock.
I can imagine a Sumerian sage in 2017 BCE remarking "apart from our obsession with little clay tablets, our society has changed little in a millennium". It might be easy from that perspective to dismiss literacy as a trivial fad; from our perspective, it is easy to take literacy for granted and overlook the transformative impact it has had on our society.
Weak AI is already here and already changing the world, it just suffers from a fundamental perceptual problem - AI that works is just software and software is boring. For decades, playing chess was seen as a grand challenge for AI. After Deep Blue's defeat of Kasparov, chess AI had become merely chess software. Our attitudes flipped almost instantaneously from "of course a computer can't beat a human at something as complex as chess" to "of course a computer can beat a human at something as simple as chess".
Google Search isn't AI, it's just an algorithm. Fully autonomous cars will stop being AI the first time you fall asleep at the wheel and wake up at your destination. Wolfram Alpha isn't AI, Siri isn't AI, content-aware fill isn't AI, Amazon's stock control system isn't AI. IBM Watson is briefly AI when it's winning a gameshow, then quickly reverts to being software.