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Note, I am a novice, so please correct me, but... TL;DR; it is very limited in what it can do, the accuracy is sometimes/(often?) not near 100%, it is an old field, meaning the progress has not all been in the past decade[1], and there is a lot of hype. I have noticed that various techniques are only good at very specific tasks. CNNs are good at image recognition, RNNs are good for language/grammar, etc. Of course, it can only recognize images it has been trained on. There are some impressive applications of these specific tasks. For example, with image recognition that can recognize road signs, pedestrians, etc., you could build a rudimentary self driving car. But it would be wrong to think that anything is possible. IIUC, we have been taking some basic building blocks and constructing systems from them. Cool, but it doesn't mean general AI is right around the corner. Even then, good can mean 80% accuracy. I can't think of the paper right now, but I read one where they improved the handling of negation in different parts of the sentences for sentiment analysis. They improved the state of the art from ~80% to 86%, IIRC. They were excited, and I know that science/research is built on incremental progress. But that's going from 1/5 wrong to 3/20. Take a look at the generated images from image generation pictures. Impressive, but a skilled photoshopper can do much better, based on what i have seen. And some papers are over hyped[2]. I hope I haven't been too hard on anyone's hard work, I'm just trying to ease fears here. Also, as mentioned in [1], it is a fairly old field, relative to computer standards of course. For example, backpropagation was a huge breakthrough, but that happened in the 80's. There have been recent breakthroughs, notably deep learning. But it would be just wrong to think that everything you are seeing is the result of the past 10 years. (Which is what I thought until a few months ago :S) Like other science research, it would also be wrong to assume it will continue linearly. In fact, there have been multiple AI winters[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...
2. https://medium.com/@yoav.goldberg/an-adversarial-review-of-a... |
A) We're striving to make strong AI.
B) It seems plausible that as computing and AI research continues, we'll get to strong AI eventually given that brains are "just" extremely complex computers.
C) We do not know what strong AI will be able to do or how it will act, if it exceeds human intelligence.
I'm not trying to troll on behalf of AI fearmongering, I swear. But I have read some of the warnings about AI that some (occasionally notable) people have made. I haven't seen many/any responses that don't just boil down to "there's nothing to worry about because strong AI is still a long ways off, so let's just keep working on it". As I noted before, those kind of counterarguments don't seem to address the anti-AI concerns in the long run.