Artificial intelligence: facts and myths

In the movies AI can do anything; in reality it can do far less. AI in the classical sense does not even exist yet.

We understand exactly how a crowbar works, and we understand how an oven or a furnace works, because our everyday experience makes it very simple to grasp. We roughly understand how a coal power plant or a wind turbine works. We have some idea of how a solar panel works. And almost none about a nuclear plant.

Anyone who is not a software engineer holds fairly hazy notions about what software actually does, how code takes effect, and somewhere around low-level and high-level programming and the cloud the picture blurs completely. And artificial intelligence is total white fog.

AI as a modern god

AI is already everywhere: in the phone, in the computer, on the internet, in video games, in cars, in plants and in factories. Humans are barely needed any more, AI does everything for them. More and more people believe that this is humanity’s last invention: last, because from here on progress will be carried not by the limited human being but by artificial intelligence with no limits at all; and last, because it will surely destroy us.

AI has become a god, a religion has been built around it, and it is surrounded by worship and dread. Everything has become solvable: cancer, pollution, a doubled lifespan, space travel - nothing is impossible any more. Artificial intelligence has beaten humans at chess, at go, at everything. It is no match for a human; the human is no match for it.

What we call AI: GOFAI

What we call AI in everyday speech is in fact GOFAI. The abbreviation stands for Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence.

GOFAI imitates thinking, imitates behaviour, and above all: it imitates development.

Real artificial intelligence learns and improves itself. GOFAI does not understand language, it only applies rules and makes statistically based decisions. It does not understand life and it does not understand the world; for it only rules exist, refined by statistics.

What AI is better at than a human is the sheer number of references and the speed of searching them. Just think of typing a word into a search engine and getting so many hits in a fraction of a second that merely counting them would be exhausting. Ten million people working ten hours a day for fifty years could not come close to one second of the AI’s work. In that, it truly is unbeatable. But it understands nothing, and because of that its analyses have no depth.