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The hysteria about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. There seems to be no shortage of sensationalist news about how AI could cure diseases, accelerate human innovation and improve human creativity. Just looking at the media headlines, you might think that we are already living in a future where AI has infiltrated every aspect of society.
While it is undeniable that AI has opened up a wealth of promising opportunities, it has also led to the emergence of a mindset that can be best described as "AI solutionism". This is the philosophy that, given enough data, machine learning algorithms can solve all of humanity's problems.
But there's a big problem with this idea. Instead of supporting AI progress, it actually jeopardises the value of machine intelligence by disregarding important AI safety principles and setting unrealistic expectations about what AI can really do for humanity.
In only a few years, the pendulum has swung from the dystopian notion that AI will destroy humanity to the utopian belief that our algorithmic saviour is here.
[...] Examples demonstrate that there is no AI solution for everything. Using AI simply for the sake of AI may not always be productive or useful. Not every problem is best addressed by applying machine intelligence to it. This is the crucial lesson for everyone aiming to boost investments in national AI programmes: all solutions come with a cost and not everything that can be automated should be.
What is your take on this? Do you think AI (as currently defined), can solve any of the problems, man-made and otherwise, of this world?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday May 29 2018, @09:48PM
Just to add to the above; I think it's only part of the picture and something of a glass-half-empty point of view. Yes, there are only a finite number of popular ideas, familiar concepts, objects and conventions in the creative arts and yes each work of art will doubtless include or rely heavily upon themes that have come before; but on the other hand no two works of art are identical. Each artist puts their own unique spin on those previous ideas. So perhaps I was being a little too cynical. I still think there's a problem of diminishing returns when artists want to keep churning out works that fit strictly within established genre. Just look at what's happening to Hollywood with stale remake after remake and the same tired plots, stunts and one liners getting trotted out ad nauseam. The remaining new fertile ground for creativity I suppose lies in the more unconventional, the abstract and the surreal. But that doesn't always bring in the big bucks, unfortunately (if you care about big bucks).
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?