Overpromising, under-delivering

More from Gary Smith and Jeffrey Funk’s “When It Comes to Critical Thinking, AI Flunks the Test by Gary Smith and Jeffrey Funk“:

It has been almost 70 years since the term “artificial intelligence” was coined at a 1956 Dartmouth College summer workshop. The conference was convened by the mathematician John McCarthy, who announced that it would “proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”

Ever since, AI enthusiasts have chronically overpromised and underdelivered. In 1965, Herbert A. Simon, a Nobel laureate in economics and a winner of the Turing Aware (“the Nobel Prize of computing”), predicted that “machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.” In 1970, the computer scientist Marvin Pinsky, another Turing winner and co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI laboratory, predicated that, in “three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.”

As the years went by, the optimistic predictions continued, undeterred by the failure of earlier prophecies. In 2008, Shane Legg, a co-founder of DeepMind Technologies, predicted that “human-level AI will be passed in the mid-2020s.” In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg said that “one of [Facebook’s] goals for the next five to 10 years is to basically get better than human love at all of the primary human senses: vision, hearing, language, general cognition.”

We are now in the mid-2020’s, and the AI hype rolls on . . . .

And see:
What is critical thinking, apart from something AI can’t do?
Overpromising, under-delivering
AI-proofing an exam question
Artificial intelligence: other posts