Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 2 days agoAGI is a hack term that is only necessary because people have been misusing the term AI. All that other stuff is just really fancy scripting and math. There’s no I involved, A or otherwise.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.
You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.
Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.
The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.
lapping6596@lemmy.world 2 days ago
To add an example, in video games we call it AI whenever the enemy appears to make a choice.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Yup, that’s a good one.
Purely for discussions sake, I’d say that the video game entity is making a choice, but it lacks volition.
No freewill or consciousness, but it’s selecting a course of action based on environment circumstances.