What are you, a child? Because you are acting like one. If someone disagrees with you, even proves you wrong, you throw a childish tantrum. Or maybe a bratty teenager.

I would expect something far mor civil from an adult.

I know for a fact that you are American, because Americans are typically so arrogant and vulgar. And usually, a lot more stupid that Canadians. I hear they still teach that the abacus is an example of a modern computer.

A computer science major in college, huh? That makes you more knowledgeable than I am? I TAUGHT computer science at the college level. I was doing neural networks in the 80’s. My first computer language was Fortran. I still have a chunk of core memory from those days - wires woven through magnetic cores. I KNOW why you are completely wrong - you just didn’t pay attention in class. You refused to learn. Students like that are very common, unfortunately. They always make life ‘interesting’ for teachers.

Of course, the fact that you consider ‘intellectual discussion’ as swearing, using vulgar language, and insults says everything about you.

You are EXACTLY a perfect example of ‘How can people really BELIEVE that crap?’ You live in a world of stupid, and nothing will change that.

By some definitions of AI, a light switch IS AI. That is my point. AI is so broadly defined, and applied, that it is a useless term.

Deep Blue, Alpha, matters not. These systems play chess, because they were set up to play chess by humans. They can not of their own volition suddenly decide to not play chess, but to play something else they were not designed for. The neural nets are trained on a specific task. They make decisions based on that training, and that task, and the task inputs. It is still basically algorithmic, where the algorithms have built-in modifiable parameters that can be real-time adjusted within their limits. It is a long way from mimicking neurons. It mimics what some human theorist THOUGHT neurons performed like. But it is still a programed algorithm that comes from a human mind, just that it is on a different technological platform than a binary computing device. It is an example of a machine being able to fine-tune a system output in real time based on feedback inputs.

The intelligence has not evolved, the human capacity to create algorithms and devices to apply those algorithms in more novel and complex ways has evolved. It is human thinking that has evolved, not the ‘artificial intelligence’ per say.

You are very, very wrong about the ‘no one knows how these neural networks work’. This statement is a perfect example of the hype behind AI. They are not hard to understand, and their functionality is not hard to grasp, as long as one can get around the bug-a-boo that they are not digital or Boolean devices. They do not follow truth tables or traditional truth table logic. But it is perfectly understood how they make decisions. We are, however, in the very rudimentary state when it comes to graphically or diagrammatically or schematically or even mathematically depicting how they work - the iconography, symbology, terminology has not yet developed comprehensively.

The ‘nets’ have absolutely no idea what is ‘winning’ or ‘losing’. or ‘reward’ or ‘punishment’. Those are human concepts that have been anthropomorphically applied to inanimate devices. What it is in reality is some form of feedback circuit (human intervention or automated) that drives the system closer or further away from the desired state -‘desired’ as determined by the human operator. We did this many decades ago, even before digital computers, using analog potentiometers and electrical meters. Musicians do this all the time when they ‘fine tune’ their instruments. We have just gotten better and better at automating it and applying it to more complex situations. Some chess moves result in a better melody, others result in a more noisy sound. The instrument - the chess playing device - is simply fine tuned by repeated performances to produce the best sound, as we humans have determined ‘best sound’ to be.

Living neurons, on the other hand, are still not completely understood, nor do we understand exactly how neurons make decisions. The best guess is that they use quantum effects, but that is only based on the fact that we are discovering more and more that life itself is based on quantum effects - photosynthesis for example, or the methods birds use for navigation across continents. But living neurons have nothing in common with these ‘neural nets’ except that a picture of one was used as some conceptual pattern or intellectual starting point that triggered some ideas in the mind of a very creative person. Like seeing a bird fly triggered the idea that maybe humans can fly. But neural networks have as much in common with living neurons as airplanes have in common with how birds fly.

But in general, what we call AI is still nothing more than humans setting up machines to automate the application of the algorithms our human minds think of in the first place. Just a more complex, complicated, light switch - some device that allows us to automate the process of connecting the light to a power source, without having to connect the wires every time we want to use it.

I don’t need to ‘look up the history’. I was there from the beginning. ARPA and DARPA. Unix based. No WWW, no HTTP, no HTML. . No ‘MarkUp Language’ at all, because there were no web pages. No browsers. Everything text based TCP/IP. Pin-up ‘Pictures’ sent as very elaborate constructs made from different typed ASCII characters providing the different shades of grey, depending on the density of the characters. I still have one. tucked away somewhere in my file drawer, I think. Since it was mostly used by grad student tech nerds in the beginning, discipline was strictly enforced by ‘flaming’. It was only when the WWW became well established that corporations realize there was money to be made from it. Before that, it was indeed ‘free’. Well, the lines paid for by the Government and Universities.

399 responses and counting. I got bore going through them. The train, apparently is VERY long and indeed will take a VERY long time to pass.

Rumor has it that a certain super-rich tech mogul has am AI bidet/toilette in his house, that has to be connected to the Internet before it will work. When the Internet glitched (the site went off-line) and lost Internet connectivity, he could not flush the toilette manually.

AI itself is not getting better. Humans are getting better at writing the algorithms that will better be able to discern, classify, categorize, identify, direct the information flow, and predict based on more improved standardized inputs.

But the ‘tech bros’ never really jumped on it until Mark went through his ‘existential crisis’ thing.

AI is now a catch-all acronym that is becoming meaningless. The old, conventional light switch on the wall of the house I first lived in some 70 years ago could be classified as 'AI. The switch makes a decision, based on what position I put it in. I turn the light on, it remembers that decision and stays on. The thing is, the decision was first made by me and the switch carried out that decision, based on criteria that was designed into it.

That is, AI still does not make any decision that humans have not designed it to make in the first place.

What is needed, is a more appropriate terminology, describing the actual process of what we call AI. And really, the more appropriate descriptor would not be Artificial Intelligence, but Human-made Intelligent devices. All of these so-called AI devices and applications are, after all, completely human designed and human made. The originating Intelligence still comes from the minds of humans.

Most of the applications which we call Artificial Intelligence are actually Algorithmic Intelligence - decisions made based on algorithms designed by humans in the first place. The devices just follow these algorithms. Since humans have written these algorithms, it should really be no surprise that these devices are making decisions very similar to the decisions humans would make. Duhhh. We made them in our own image, no wonder they ‘think’ like us.

Really, these AI devices do not make decisions, they merely follow the decisions humans first designed into them.

Big Blue, the IBM chess playing computer, plays excellent chess because humans designed it to play chess, and to make chess decisions, based on how humans first designed the chess game.

What would be really scarry would be if Big Blue decided of its own volition that it no longer wanted to play chess, but it wanted to play a game it designed.

Except that most Chinese would never use the name ‘Jesus Christ’. That is a strictly Western thing.

Few people in America accept it. The rest of the world, yeah they believe it and are acting on it.

And this s why China is now the world’s largest economy, GDP-PPP, and now has a standard of living far in excess of the US. China built more miles of high speed railway every year than the US has total.

Yet instead of trying to keep up with China, the typical American buries their head in the sand and WISHES it were not true. Well, wishing and populist propaganda is not going to help much, except ease the pain for Americans.

But no worries, China will soon own most of American manufacturing, and start up the American plants again, using cheap slave-wage American workers, to supply the huge Chinese domestic and export market, just like Haier bought out General Electric Appliance Division and is now using American plants and cheap labor to assemble made-in-China parts to service the American markets with allegedly made-in-America-but-in-reality Chinese appliances, all profits going back to China. Just got to love those Trump tariffs. The Chinese are using their tariff income to buy bankrupt American manufacturing.