Sci-Fi AI is Gone. What's Left is Worse

OpenAI backs away from scare mongering about real intelligence. It leans in to screwing everyone instead.

Hi everyone,

I…. really wish I didn’t have to write this. The story of AI was supposed to turn out differently. It was always an agreed upon dichotomy: either we make truly intelligent machines—a kind of philosophical or almost religious pursuit—or we go back to business as usual on planet earth, with humans and our boring but understandable and instrumentally useful technologies. Calculators. Radar. Spreadsheets. Voice translation. Auto-pilot. Self-assist cars that mostly keep doing the same thing after we press the button, and maybe see and navigate a curve or stoplight, but it’s technology and watch the road. Face recognition that occasionally fingers the wrong fellow but generally alerts law enforcement to would-be evil doers. Et Cetera. That was the either/or. That was the whole project of AI since I started this all in the early 2000s, and far earlier from the get-go of the field, in the 1950s, when the smartest mathematicians and physicists and economists figured they could code up thought like logical expressions and whiz-bang the new Turing Machines implemented with the Von Neumann architecture and we’d be done by now. True AGI. On to terracing Mars.

Here’s what really happened. Here’s what’s RIGHT NOW happening, as reported by TechCrunch.