[stevehiehn]

Each time this conversation comes up I notice people often like to suggest that history is just repeating and we have seen this before. I think its important to recognize patterns in cycles but its also important to be open to the possibility we've only seen local cycles and larger global cycles are still revealing themselves. In other words is AI really analogous to shifts we've seen before?

[eternalban]

I agree. History certainly didn't repeat itself when it came to the scientific and technological explosion of the past ~150+ years.

But if we are considering history, we may also wish to recall that education was strictly for the clerical and aristocratic classes before the industrial revolution. And we may also wish to remember that in US none other than the robber baron John D. Rockefeller took initiative to shape the educational paradigm for the "peasants".

Will the peasants need to be educated anymore?

[_rpd]

The "AI" being discussed is mainly competent data mining and machine learning. If we stay at that level, then there are easily bigger shifts that we've adjusted to in the past.

But self-improving AI is truly on a different level, as is AI with human-level 'general intelligence'.

[stevehiehn]

I hear ya on the data mining observation. I have been digging into 'applied' ML for the last two years or so and its painfully obvious how many articles are based on science fiction and not the current state of things (which appears to be mostly reinforcement learning)

[_rpd]

So much tech journalism falls prey to the logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence ...

http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza...