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by hpoe 1649 days ago
When it gets to questions like these I feel that we transcend discussions of technology and end up on questions of philosiphy which aren't going to be going anywhere anytime quick.

I also feel that AI should be used to augment not replace human decision making, it seems that where AI shines is problems that are well defined with well defined solutions, and because the AI doesn't get tired, hungry or distracted it can do that really well, but it fails in novel situations[0]. As such it seems to me our best bet is to have the AI provide suggestions rather than have complete control.

0. What is meant by that is a read an article, can't find it now, about using AI to diagnose breast cancer, what they found is that about 90% of the time the AI could accurately check for breast cancer, but the other 10% of the time was an unusual mammogram or something relatively rare, and in those situations the AI would often misdiagnoise.

1 comments

AI had meaning that originated from CS theorists before being usurped and losing all meaning. I think tech and associated marketing (which are great, don't get me wrong, I love money!) are the ones at fault here. It should be more of a "philosophical" question, though I'd prefer instead perhaps it be academic.

I'm not trying to be rude, but your example of what AI should be is narrow and not very grandiose compared the original meaning. I understand you were talking pretty loosely, so I feel like I'm singling you out but this happened to be where I started typing, sorry!

It just reminded of how essentially all conversations about "AI" go. They seem to end up being quite specific, narrow pattern recognition problems at the end of the day. Maybe there's some decision theory on top of it. Maybe if there's enough money /people involved, there's more components, so it's a complicated enough supervised learning problem that it mimics people to a sufficient extent that it looks intelligent enough to make a headline. But it's a copycat, not intelligent. Hey, full circle, Melanie Mitchell! - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_(software)