Pylimitics

in 2024 Ali Alkhatib wrote Defining AI, a definitely-worth-reading essay about trying to clarify what “AI” (in its current form, 70 years into the use of the damn term). He included this:

“I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power.”

Alkhatib tries, in the essay, to clarify the public thinking around what AI is, exactly, and what it isn’t. The published explanations and tests supposedly “defining” AI tend to be blurry, ill-considered, and functionally useless. The book AI Snake Oil, for one example, proposes that one question to ask about software claimed to be “AI” is:
Was the behavior of the system directly specified in code by the developer, or did it indirectly emerge, say by learning from examples or searching through a database?

Alkhatib looks askance at this, and quite legitimately. What is that sentence even about? Indirect emergence? And evidently you should delve into the code itself to find out whether a database search is specified or…not?

That kind of scrutiny strikes me as both ridiculous and going in the wrong direction. You wouldn’t make up your mind about a person’s (or, say, an “entity’s”) intelligence by the results of a brain scan.

There isn’t any pat answer at the end of Defining AI, and I suspect a pat answer may not be possible. As far as I know nobody has fashioned a cogent and generally agreed upon explanation of what intelligence is, artificial or not. In that kind of foggy, blurry field of thought it’s all too easy to ascribe value to what turns out, on closer inspection, to be just word salad. Maybe the most valuable aspect of AI Snake Oil is the title itself.