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AnonTechie [soylentnews.org] writes:

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 [bigthink.com], accelerate human innovation [weforum.org] and improve human creativity [venturebeat.com]. 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 [technologyreview.com], 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 [technologyreview.com].

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 [independent.co.uk] to the utopian belief that our algorithmic saviour [weforum.org] 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.

The Conversation [theconversation.com]

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?

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