Tech dirty secret: AI is like Santa Claus
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a children story. It doesn’t exist.
Kids love Santa Claus. He has a funny beard and outfit. More importantly, he brings gifts. When children finally learn that Santa was a lie, the news is often devastating. But when the gifts continue to come the next year, they quickly get over it.
Similarly, I think that AI is a sci-fy lie. But like Santa Claus, it’s a lie that brings gifts.
Why am I saying that Artificial Intelligence doesn’t exist?
I think it’s helpful to start from the beginning. In 1956, the field of computer science was still young, but researchers were optimistic. Marvin Minsky and John McCarty, together with Claude Shannon and Nathan Rochester launched the Dartmouth Conference with the avowed goal to solve the artificial intelligence problem “in one summer.” They defined AI as “making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving.”
