Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI) — A Shitpost
Today, we’re going to talk about artificial intelligence, often abbreviated as IA — wait, no, I meant AI… er, let’s start over from the top.
Today, we’re going to talk about augmented intelligence, often abbreviated as AI. Now, when I was in school, the very first thing teachers did to help me understand a new subject was to define it. So what is AI? Experts disagree — we don’t know. Simple enough, isn’t i — wait, what?
off camera
A: Wait what do you mean we don’t know
I: We don’t… we just don’t kn —
A: Oh my god, just Google it and tell me what the firs —
Today, we define AI as alchemy. You throw some numbers at it, bring together a few angry men on Twitter, and voila — it just works.
AI is incredible. One of the goals we one day hope to achieve with it is to make an autonomous vehicle that can drive itself. But don’t worry, this doesn’t mean humans will lose their jobs as taxi or Uber drivers — don’t listen to those scary fear-mongering economists — because of course we’ll still need humans around to do the one thing our robot cars could never do: spot street signs.
Now, in order to fully appreciate where AI is today, you’re contractually obligated to hear the Western-specific story of how one British man went to a party one day and wondered, “Can machines think?” The man’s name was Benedict Cumber — I mean, Alan Turing, and in 1950 he posed the question of whether a man could tell if he was talking to a woman or a computer when sending messages between separate rooms. (This would honestly be a pretty interesting plot twist to throw onto the next season of Netflix’s Love Is Blind, whose first season you can now stream exclusively on Netflix™ using the account your ex once gave you access to but you “happened” to forget logging out of for the last two years.) But just as the field of computer science systematically tried to erase all traces of women being present in its history after WWII, no one really remembers that part about a woman being involved in the test. Not to mention the British also really liked to ignore in the history books that Turing was a gay man and they actually spent years drugging him until he died of cyanide poisoning that totally wasn’t a state-sponsored assassination, those homophobic motherfu —
Today, the “Turing Test” is brought up as a hypothetical question of whether a computer could be intelligent enough to convince a person that it was man rather than machine. It’s the go-to example used to set up the idea that if it were indeed possible, perhaps, then we could say that a machine is “artificially intelligent.” But personally, I — and many other experts — think that this is too narrow of a test of intelligence to pass. Why is communication the only metric to measure if something is intelligent or not? I mean, I don’t think a computer could ever be as intelligent as a human until it could beat us at a game of chess. (off screen: It already did.) I mean, not until it could beat us at that game show with the trivia questions, you know, Jeopardy! (off screen: It did that, too.) Starcraft, then! (sigh off screen)
Will AI ever be as intelligent as humans? We may never know.
Stay tuned for a behind-the-scenes article explaining the various references and decisions that went into this article. It may come out some time in the next five years, hopefully.
Wells Lucas Santo is an educator on the societal implications of artificial intelligence. He has too much time on his hands self-quarantining at home with possible coronavirus and is actually really unemployed so for anyone reading this bio, hook an enby up with a job. He received his Master’s in Computer Science from New York University and currently resides in Oakland, CA.
