Pretty much everything wrong about our perception of AI technologies (among both researchers and the general public) boils down to excessive anthropomorphism.
AI is tricky; it emulates exactly the narrow set of human skills it is explicitly designed or trained to emulate, and none of the others.
In doing so, it takes every available shortcut, producing a system that has essentially no common ground with the human mind.
In doing so, it takes every available shortcut, producing a system that has essentially no common ground with the human mind.
AI is effectively a cognitive cartoon -- superficially, it looks like it's alive, but it's really a sequence of crude sketches on paper that emulate human expressions/behavior.
As such, a project like Sophia the robot is really the epitome of contemporary AI.
As such, a project like Sophia the robot is really the epitome of contemporary AI.
AI is to human cognitive abstractions what cartoon characters are to human emotions.
Crucially, the generation of autonomous abstraction is largely orthogonal to the encoding & operationalization of existing human abstractions as seen in current AI systems - much like creating cartoon characters is orthogonal to creating new lifeforms.
AI has yet to get started.
AI has yet to get started.
