[tomxor]

> I see this as a version of the tragedy of the commons, in which (for example) many people overfish a particular set of waters [...] if and when the public, governments, and investment community recognize that they have been sold an unrealistic picture of AI’s strengths and weaknesses that doesn't match reality, a new AI winter may commence.

I think this is not only inevitable, but necessary! This time around it has been a lot more useful, due in no small part to the advance in hardware since 1970s.

Unfortunately this has caused many important people to believe far too much of the hype and not see it's current limitations. As a result they have started integrating it into important part of our societies - i find this alarming - not for the reason most people find it alarming i.e "because it's too smart", but because it's far far too dumb in combination with people assuming it's very smart. I think a lot of this problem stems from inappropriately anthropomorphising ML with terms like "AI" when we are no where near the stage that we need to have the philosophical debate about where something is sentient or "intelligent". The ML we are doing with NNs is still at the "tiny-chunk-of-very-specifically-engineered-piece-of-brain" stage. It's important people understand this before we start integrating what are essentially basic statistical mechanisms into our societies.

For those in pursuit of better ML and things like real AI aka AGI, I also think having the hype blow away will do more good in the form of clarity and lack of noise than it will harm in lack of funding.