That's all they are, according to Nathan Beacom, who wrote recently in the online journal The Dispatch an article with the title "There Is No Such Thing as Artificial Intelligence."
His point is an important one, as the phrase "artificial intelligence" and its abbreviation "AI" have enjoyed a boom in usage since 2000, according to Google's Ngrams analysis of words appearing in published books. The system plots frequency of occurrence, as a percentage, versus time. The term "AI" peaked around 1965 and again around 1987, which correspond to the first and second comings of AI, both of which fizzled out as the digital technology of the time and the algorithms used were inadequate to realize most of the hopes of developers.
But starting around 2014, usage of "AI" soared until in 2022 (the last year surveyed by the Ngram machine), it stands at a level higher than the highest peak ever enjoyed by a common but very different phrase, "IRS." So perhaps people now think the only inevitable things are death and AI, not death and taxes.
Kidding aside, Beacom says that the language we use about the technology generally referred to as AI has a profound influence on how we view it. And his point is that a basic philosophical fallacy is embedded in the term "artificial intelligence." Namely, what AI does is not intelligent in any meaningful sense of the term. And fooling ourselves into thinking it is, as millions are doing every day, can lead to big problems.
He begins his article with a few extreme cases. A woman left her husband because he developed weird conspiracy theories after he became obsessed with a chatbot, and another woman beat up on her husband after he told her the chatbot she was involved with was not "real."
The problem arises when we fall into the easy trap of behaving as though Siri, Alexa, Claude, and their AI friends are real people, as real as the checkout person at the grocery store or the voice who answers on the other end of the line when we call Mom. Admittedly, quite a few of the chatbots out there would pass the Turing test, which compares the responses to typed commands and queries between a human being and a computer.
But to believe that an AI chatbot can think and possesses human intelligence is a mistake. According to Beacom, it's as much a mistake to believe that as it was for the probably apocryphal New Guinea tribesman who, when first hearing a voice come out of a radio, opened it up to see the little man inside. The tribesman was disappointed, and it didn't do the radio any good either.
We can't open up AI systems to see the works, as they consist of giant server farms in remote areas that are intentionally hidden from view, like the Wizard of Oz who hid behind a curtain as he tried to astound his guests with fire and smoke. Instead, companies promote chatbots as companions for elderly people or entertainment for the lonely young. And if you decide to establish a personal relationship with a chatbot, you are always in control. The algorithms are designed to please the human, not the other way around, and such a relationship will have little if any of the unpredictability and friction that always happens when one human being interacts with another human being.
That is because human intelligence is a clean different kind of a thing than what AI does. Beacom makes the point that all the machines can do is a fancy kind of autocomplete function. Large-language models use their huge databases of what has been said on the Internet to predict what kind of thing is most likely to come after whatever the human interlocutor says or asks. And so the only way it can sound human is by basing its responses on the replies of millions of other humans.
But an AI system no more understands what it is saying, or thinks about your question, than a handheld calculator thinks about what the value of pi is. Both a simple electronic calculator and the largest system of server farms and Internet connections are fundamentally the same kind of thing. A newborn baby and its elemental responses to its environment, as simple as they are, represents a difference in kind, not degree, from any type of machine. A baby has intelligence, as rudimentary as it is. But a machine, no matter how complex and no matter what algorithms are running on it, is just a machine, as predictable (in principle, but no longer in practice in many cases) as a mechanical adding machine's motions.
Nobody in his right mind is going to treat a calculator like it was his best friend. But the temptation is there to attribute minds and understanding to AI systems, and the systems' developers often encourage that attitude, because it leads to further engagement and, ultimately, profits.
There is nothing inherently wrong with profits, but Beacom says we need to begin to disengage ourselves from the delusion that AI systems have personalities or minds or understanding. And the way he wants us to start is to quit referring to them as AI.
His preferred terminology is "pattern engine," as nearly everything AI does can be subsumed under the general category of pattern repetition and modification.
Beacom probably realizes his proposal is unlikely to catch on. Terms are important, but even more important are the attitudes we bring toward things we deal with. Beacom touches on the real spiritual problem involved in all this when he says that those who recognize the true nature of what we now call AI will "be able to see the clay feet of the new idol."
Whenever a friend of mine holds his phone flat, brings it to his mouth, and asks something like "What is the capital of North Dakota?" I call it "consulting the oracle." I mean it jokingly, and I don't think my friend is seriously worshipping his phone, but some people treat AI, or whatever we want to call it, as something worthy of the kind of devotion that only humans deserve. That is truly idolatry. And as the Bible and history prove, idolatry almost always ends badly.
Sources: Nathan Beacom's article "There Is No Such Thing as Artificial Intelligence" appeared in The Dispatch at https://thedispatch.com/article/artificial-intelligence-morality-honesty-pattern-engines/.
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