{"id":4257,"date":"2003-08-02T12:32:20","date_gmt":"2003-08-02T12:32:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4257"},"modified":"2023-10-06T13:10:31","modified_gmt":"2023-10-06T17:10:31","slug":"against-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4257","title":{"rendered":"against artificial intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have lost the reference, but sometime within the last 72 hours, I<\/p>\n<p>read a quote by an official of the Defense Advanced Research Projects<\/p>\n<p>Agency (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.darpa.mil\/\">DARPA<\/a>), the agency that<\/p>\n<p>helped launch the Internet and recently got into trouble for creating<\/p>\n<p>a &quot;futures market&quot; in terrorism. This official bemoaned the<\/p>\n<p>stupidity of his laptop, which doesn&#8217;t know what he wants it to do;<\/p>\n<p>he called for much more public investment in artificial intelligence<\/p>\n<p>(AI).<\/p>\n<p>I have an interesting colleague in computer science, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.umd.edu\/%7Eben\/\">Ben<\/p>\n<p>Shneiderman<\/a>, who strongly criticizes AI research. His argument is<\/p>\n<p>not that the machines will take over the world and make us do their<\/p>\n<p>will. Rather, he argues that AI tends to make machines less useful,<\/p>\n<p>because they become unpredictable. When, for example, Microsoft Word<\/p>\n<p>tries to anticipate my desires by suddenly numbering or bulleting my<\/p>\n<p>paragraphs, that can be convenient&#8212;but it can also be a big nuisance.<\/p>\n<p>Shneiderman argues that computers are best understood as tools; and<\/p>\n<p>a good tool is easy to understand and highly predictable. It lets us<\/p>\n<p>do what <em>we <\/em>want. All the revolutionary computer technologies<\/p>\n<p>have been very tool-like, with no AI features. (Think of email, word<\/p>\n<p>processing, and spreadsheets.) Meanwhile, untold billions of dollars<\/p>\n<p>have been poured into AI, with very modest practical payoffs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have lost the reference, but sometime within the last 72 hours, I read a quote by an official of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the agency that helped launch the Internet and recently got into trouble for creating a &quot;futures market&quot; in terrorism. This official bemoaned the stupidity of his laptop, which [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-internet-and-public-issues"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4257"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30355,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4257\/revisions\/30355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}