AI Is BS Spelled AI

I don't believe I've ever seen such a fantastic pile of nonsense as "AI is going to solve every conceivable problem." I think anyone with a brain in their head should understand AI is just the latest over-hyped tech that will fail to deliver just like everything else.

It's not artificial when Microsoft buys GitHub with the intent of injecting an "all your code belongs to us" clause in legal language buried deeply in an EULA nobody is going to read. It's not artificial to use GitHub to power Copilot. It's not artificial to power text prompting image generators with all manner of existing content, some of which is copyrighted, or the same thing for music or written works.

It's not artificial when MS takes Cortana down for spewing racism within 24 hours and retraining it with a subset of the internet that isn't racist. It's not artificial when Just Walk Out is powered by humans watching videos of customers to determine what they put in their bags and automatically bill them for it.

AI is way overhyped: Elon is just a typical full of himself CEO of a high-flying company. AI is not going to reshape the world. All it is going to do is augment existing technology, software, and processes. It is only ever going to be capable of being an assistant. Anyone who thinks otherwise is only fooling themselves.

There's a reason why AI code assistants generate insecure code from other insecure code: they simply do not have the ability to reason. I can reason with another developer about why I take a particular approach to a particular programming problem given a particular set of circumstances. My reasoning changes with changing circumstances.

Intelligence is largely a matter of U+1F595, Reversed Hand with Middle Finger Extended. An example would be Huckleberry Finn, traveling down the river with Jim. Huck grew up in an incredibly racist society, where the first sentence out of someone else's mouth of a different race than yours is either filled with hate or not filled with hate. Everyone wore their racism on their sleeve. The white kid Huck decided the grown-up black man Jim is a good man, despite all the crap he had heard his whole life from white people about blacks. It was his U+1F595 moment toward the society he grew up in.

This is how we evolve our thinking, how we shape our attitude over time towards this world, and the people and processes we are surrounded by - we reverse our hands and extend our middle fingers towards everything we see as stupid, hateful, hurtful, useless, pointless, or any other sort of false premise. AI will never be capable of doing this in its present form. AI could only do this if it was self-aware.

Do you want an AI that explains to you why it is so smart and you are so stupid? Why everything you do to get ahead in life is hopelessly pointless? How your children would be better served if only you cared to be a better parent? Looks down on you as another waste of its CPU cycles? Sees you as the human child in its care?

We don't actually want AI because we don't want a self-aware consciousness we can't control running everything. We want an assistant to help us to perform boring, lengthy, and repetitive tasks better. We expect the assistant to be far better than current AI results offer. AI in its present form is useful for search tasks, such as:

• Search for better ways to play games like chess or go
• Find better ways to arrange thousands of traces on many layers of a motherboard
• Optimize search results for considerations like heat, pressure, time, density, weight, color
• Find the best route for a salesman to travel and other graphing problems
• A reasonable translation of text or spoken words from one language to another

None of the above is life-altering, it is simply more convenient. It was definitely more convenient for me and my other half in our recent trip to Mexico to be able to use Google Translate with cab drivers, and people on the street asking for directions and other conversations. We could have gotten by without it, but it was definitely better.

We need to stop calling it AI and call it what it is: virtual assistance. That's all it is, all it will ever be, and all we will ever want it to be. We will always want to know how things work, we will never want technology or processes that only the computer can understand. We will never have wanted and never will want AI.