How Important Is AI?

Maybe it’ not a real word, but if it’s one combination of letters which has been used more than any other word combination this year, it’s got to b4e the letters ‘AI.’

As I was driving down to the local Panera to have a cup of four-dollar coffee, mu car radio was playing some advertisements for companies selling various products and services, like venetian blinds and getting your front lawn cut, and every, single ad mentioned ‘AI’ which somehow made their products or their services more valuable, or more something compared to competitive companies or products that don’t use AI.

Defining something as being artificial, as in artificial intelligence, means that it’s a process that’s different from the real thing, which in the case of intelligence, is the thought process which goes on between a pair of human ears.

Now, we’ve had robots and robotic machinery around for a long time, but what makes AI different from these earlier efforts to replicate certain human behaviors with machines, is that the computers which run today’s AI robots run so quickly and access so much data, that it is now considered possible, if not likely that some day the world will be run by human beings but by machines.

I’m not sure when all this machine versus man stuff first started to appear, probably sometime back when Hollywood began looking for movie themes that would replace the Westerns, but the whole narrative took a giant step forward when an MIT-educated scientist and entrepreneur named Ray Kurzweil published a collection of essays, The Age of Intelligent Machines, which predicted that we would soon reach an ‘age of singularity’ when the ability of computers would outstrip human intelligence, leading to world developments which humanity cannot control.

Kurzweil’s argument is based on the idea that computers can learn, retain, and reshape what he believes are recognition of certain patterns which the brain uses to understand and respond to various external stimuli which together comprise how the world operates around us.

Ever since the technology of computing moved away from relying on mainframe access to personal machines, the market for electronic gadgets has been shaped and dominated by equipment which gets smaller, faster, and capable of running different recognition applications…