May We Never ....

[Richard Dale]

14 minutes ago, SJK said:

My pet peeve is the incredible misuse of Artificial Intelligence, or AI.  I work (partly) with developing automation schemes for mining machines and I'm getting tired of saying "It's not AI, it's just a program".

The term has become synonymous with neural networks and machine learning, when it used to cover a range of technologies such a rule based systems, logic programming and genetic algorithms. On the upside, AI never used to work when I studied it as a student a long time ago, but now it does thanks to the hugely more powerful computation and data sets we now have available. Neural networks aren’t very good at explaining how they came to make a decision and so I’m sure the old fashioned ‘expert systems’ approach will come back in some form.