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posted by on Tuesday February 07 2017, @05:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-not-with-a-bang-but-a-goto dept.

Forget super-AI. Crappy AI is more likely to be our downfall, argues researcher.

[...] It's not that computer scientists haven't argued against AI hype, but an academic you've never heard of (all of them?) pitching the headline "AI is hard" is at a disadvantage to the famous person whose job description largely centers around making big public pronouncements. This month that academic is Alan Bundy, a professor of automated reasoning at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, who argues in the Communications of the ACM that there is a real AI threat, but it's not human-like machine intelligence gone amok. Quite the opposite: the danger is instead shitty AI. Incompetent, bumbling machines.

Bundy notes that most all of our big-deal AI successes in recent years are extremely narrow in scope. We have machines that can play Jeopardy and Go—at tremendous cost in both cases—but that's nothing like general intelligence.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-real-threat-is-machine-incompetence-not-intelligence

An interesting take on the AI question. What do Soylentils think of this scenario ?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @01:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 08 2017, @01:30PM (#464518)

    A solution would be to have more verbose programming languages, where little errors are likely to cause compile errors instead of malfunctioning code. However few programmers would enjoy statements like

    Now set foo to the sum of bar and the product of baz and qux, please.

    (where "Now" and "please" mark the beginning and end of the statement) instead of simply

    foo = bar + baz * qux;