For the people being falsely portrayed as “Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan”, this is probably just a minor nuisance, but it provides an illustration of how laughable the notion is that Google will ever be capable of using its relentlessly over-hyped “AI” to make sense of information on the web.
He didn’t use the word “disprove”, but when he’s calling it laughable that AI will ever (ever! Emphasis his!) be able to merely “make sense of his information on the web”, I think gwern’s gloss is closer to accurate than yours. It’s 2024 and Google is already using AI to make sense of information on the web, this isn’t just “anti-singularitarian snark”.
he’s calling it laughable that AI will ever (ever! Emphasis his!)
The 2016 passage you quoted is calling it laughable that Google-in-particular’s technology (marketed as “AI”, but Egan doesn’t think the term is warranted) will ever be able to make sense of information on the web. It’s Gary Marcus–like skepticism about the reliability and generality of existing-paradigm machine learning techniques, not Hubert Dreyfus–like skepticism of whether a machine could think in all philosophical strictness. I think this is a really important distinction that the text of your comment and Gwern’s comment (“disproves AI”, “laughable that AI will ever”) aren’t being clear about.
(I agree; my intent in participating in this tedious thread is merely to establish that “mathematician crankery [about] Google Image Search, and how it disproves AI” is a different thing from “made an overconfident negative prediction about AI capabilities”.)
He didn’t use the word “disprove”, but when he’s calling it laughable that AI will ever (ever! Emphasis his!) be able to merely “make sense of his information on the web”, I think gwern’s gloss is closer to accurate than yours. It’s 2024 and Google is already using AI to make sense of information on the web, this isn’t just “anti-singularitarian snark”.
The 2016 passage you quoted is calling it laughable that Google-in-particular’s technology (marketed as “AI”, but Egan doesn’t think the term is warranted) will ever be able to make sense of information on the web. It’s Gary Marcus–like skepticism about the reliability and generality of existing-paradigm machine learning techniques, not Hubert Dreyfus–like skepticism of whether a machine could think in all philosophical strictness. I think this is a really important distinction that the text of your comment and Gwern’s comment (“disproves AI”, “laughable that AI will ever”) aren’t being clear about.
Well, to be clear, that too has been solidly falsified. Gemini seems plenty capable of making sense of information on the web.
(I agree; my intent in participating in this tedious thread is merely to establish that “mathematician crankery [about] Google Image Search, and how it disproves AI” is a different thing from “made an overconfident negative prediction about AI capabilities”.)