The new AI spring: a deflationary view
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CURMUDGEON CORNER
The new AI spring: a deflationary view Jocelyn Maclure1 Received: 29 August 2019 / Accepted: 9 September 2019 © Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2019
The current hype about artificial intelligence makes a sober assessment of the state of the technology and its likely societal impacts difficult. AI researchers, start-ups, investors and the media all have their own incentives to keep the hype going. China and the US compete for pole position in AI research and development, and the EU and most economically advanced countries vie for the remaining top spots. The mighty multinational corporations of the digital economy rival for both new and established researchers and engineers. Where I live, in Montreal, Facebook, Alphabet (Google Brain and Deep Mind), Microsoft and Samsung all lured top scientists into their newly opened labs, and both the provincial and federal governments invested massively to maintain the Canadian edge in AI. If this weren‘t enough, some of the best fiction of recent years—Ex Machina, Her, Westworld, Ian McEwan’s recent Machines Like Me—all hijack our power of imagination so that we keep picturing ourselves sharing our lives with intelligent machines for whom passing the Turing Test is child’s play. The new AI spring has been powered by the ongoing increase of the brute force of computers combined with the availability of large digital datasets and with the replacement of the formal logic-based approaches to AI with various kinds of machine learning algorithms. This renewal launched a new wave of outlandish speculation about the future development of AI. DeepMind’s founder Demis Hassabis dreams of building the first “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) and, holding nothing back, thinkers such Kurzweil (2006), Bostrom (2014), Tegmark (2017) and David Chalmers (2010) either predict that the technological “Singularity” is near or at the very least that we should be thinking hard about the emergence of artificial superintelligence. The coming of the überAI is more likely, according to them, than the rise of Zarathustra’s übermensch. * Jocelyn Maclure [email protected] 1
Faculté de Philosophie, Pavillon Félix‑Antoine‑Savard, Bureau 532, Université Laval, 2325, rue des Bibliothèques, Québec, QC G1V 0A6, Canada
Such overinflated optimism about the technological development of AI is nothing new. In his classic paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, Alan Turing opined that computers were likely to succeed at the imitation game within the next 50 years (Turing 1950). The Nobel Prize winner in economics Herbert Simons predicted in 1965 that “machines will be capable of doing any work a man can do” within 20 years. Inflationism is channeled today by thinkers such as Bostrom, Tegmark, Kurzweil and Chalmers. The influential historian and essayist Yuval Noah Harari amplified and lent credibility to their science-fictioninspired metaphysics in his speculative histories of the near and far future. According to Harari, one of the main existential iss
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