Maybe it’s magic, maybe it’s math—nobody can decide.
July 16, 2024
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
It’s the simplest questions that are often the hardest to answer. That applies to AI, too. Even though it’s a technology being sold as a solution to the world’s problems, nobody seems to know what it really is. It’s a label that’s been slapped on technologies ranging from self-driving cars to facial recognition, chatbots to fancy Excel. But in general, when we talk about AI, we talk about technologies that make computers do things we think need intelligence when done by people.
For months, my colleague Will Douglas Heaven has been on a quest to go deeper to understand why everybody seems to disagree on exactly what AI is, why nobody even knows, and why you’re right to care about it. He’s been talking to some of the biggest thinkers in the field, asking them, simply: What is AI? It’s a great piece that looks at the past and present of AI to see where it is going next. You can read it here.
Here’s a taste of what to expect:
Artificial intelligence almost wasn’t called “artificial intelligence” at all. The computer scientist John McCarthy is credited with coming up with the term in 1955 when writing a funding application for a summer research program at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. But more than one of McCarthy’s colleagues hated it. “The word ‘artificial’ makes you think there’s something kind of phony about this,” said one. Others preferred the terms “automata studies,” “complex information processing,” “engineering psychology,” “applied epistemology,” “neural cybernetics,” “non-numerical computing,” “neuraldynamics,” “advanced automatic programming,” and “hypothetical automata.” Not quite as cool and sexy as AI.
AI has several zealous fandoms. AI has acolytes, with a faith-like belief in the technology’s current power and inevitable future improvement. The buzzy popular narrative is shaped by a pantheon of big-name players, from Big Tech marketers in chief like Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella to edgelords of industry like Elon Musk and Sam Altman to celebrity computer scientists like Geoffrey Hinton. As AI hype has ballooned, a vocal anti-hype lobby has risen in opposition, ready to smack down its ambitious, often wild claims. As a result, it can feel as if different camps are talking past one another, not always in good faith.
This sometimes seemingly ridiculous debate has huge consequences that affect us all. AI has a lot of big egos and vast sums of money at stake. But more than that, these disputes matter when industry leaders and opinionated scientists are summoned by heads of state and lawmakers to explain what this technology is and what it can do (and how scared we should be). They matter when this technology is being built into software we use every day, from search engines to word-processing apps to assistants on your phone. AI is not going away. But if we don’t know what we’re being sold, who’s the dupe?
For example, meet the TESCREALists. A clunky acronym (pronounced “tes-cree-all”) replaces an even clunkier list of labels: transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism. It was coined by Timnit Gebru, who founded the Distributed AI Research Institute and was Google’s former ethical AI co-lead, and Émile Torres, a philosopher and historian at Case Western Reserve University. Some anticipate human immortality; others predict humanity’s colonization of the stars. The common tenet is that an all-powerful technology is not only within reach but inevitable. TESCREALists believe that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, could not only fix the world’s problems but level up humanity. Gebru and Torres link several of these worldviews—with their common focus on “improving” humanity—to the racist eugenics movements of the 20th century.
Is AI math or magic? Either way, people have strong, almost religious beliefs in one or the other. “It’s offensive to some people to suggest that human intelligence could be re-created through these kinds of mechanisms,” Ellie Pavlick, who studies neural networks at Brown University, told Will. “People have strong-held beliefs about this issue—it almost feels religious. On the other hand, there’s people who have a little bit of a God complex. So it’s also offensive to them to suggest that they just can’t do it.”
Will’s piece really is the definitive look at this whole debate. No spoilers—there are no simple answers, but lots of fascinating characters and viewpoints. I’d recommend you read the whole thing here—and see if you can make your mind up about what AI really is.
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