Artificial intelligence is hilarious. It seemed like a fad, but people now seem to take it seriously. Maybe it’s time for a reality check.
There is no intelligence. This article may not be for the layperson, but for those who can follow: there is no intelligence in AI.
What is artificial intelligence? For programmers, it’s clear: you can program an IF-ELSE. In essence, that is artificial intelligence. The code decides whether it’s one thing or the other, and does something different in each case.
But how is AI any different? Well, it isn’t. AI is a word that people seem to get worked up about. Especially investors. As if a breakthrough has occurred in the cosmic loom. As if we can suddenly enter black holes in the universe for the first time. Groundbreaking. Revolutionary.
But that is complete nonsense. AI is simply laziness that lets us cut corners. A good example is Bootstrap. Instead of coding a button on a website ourselves to make it look nice, we use Bootstrap. With a single class on our HTML button, it suddenly looks good. But is that AI? No, it’s just leaving the work to someone else. AI works the same way.
A concrete example. Suppose you want an alarm when a yellow train passes in front of your webcam. How would you have done that before AI? You would analyze each frame from the webcam with software. From the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner. And for each pixel, you would check the RGB value. If it’s yellow, you trigger an alarm.
But how is AI different? Well, with AI, you tell it you want an alarm for the color yellow. You don’t program it yourself; you give the task to AI. But is that AI intelligent? No. You’ve just made your life easier by giving the task to AI. Someone else wrote the AI code. Someone trained the model. But it’s still the same code and technique at its core. The only thing you did was not program it yourself and leave it to someone else: a model.
And that model can certainly recognize, for the task “alarm for yellow,” that the color yellow on a webcam is a bit darker at night. That’s the nice thing about AI. You say “yellow,” but instead of just recognizing #00FF00, it also recognizes #828223 without you having to code it yourself.
But the fact that people are now pouring billions into AI companies is really an example of hype and a bubble by investors who have no idea what they’re talking about. AI is a shortcut, just like many software libraries that help a programmer save time. We’ve been doing that for years, in every field. This time is no different. There is no intelligence. There is simply convenience: you don’t have to code everything yourself.