What is AI and is it real?

An artificial plant, not real. Artificial limb, not a real body part. Artificial sweetener, not real sugar. Artificial grass, not real grass. Artificial tears, not real tears. We can build a satellite, but not a planet. Edison gave us artificial light, but we haven’t made a sun. 

artificial (adjective)

1. made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural:
   “her skin glowed in the artificial light” · “an artificial limb” · “artificial flowers”
   • (of a situation or concept) not existing naturally; contrived or false:
     “the artificial division of people into age groups”
2. (of a person or their behavior) insincere or affected:
   “an artificial smile”

So is artificial intelligence real intelligence? Is it a Google SEO bot on steroids? IBM Deep  Blue was the first artificial chess master. (Began in 1985 at Carnegie Mellon University). It moved to IBM in 1996 where it lost, then upgraded in 1997 and won 2 and drew in 4. Chess Master! This is considered patient Zero, just not a real patient. It was a  special purpose built computer. Thats where we have been and still are. 

They tell us that the computers that Walmart uses are about as strong as the pentagons. Of course, Google, Facebook, and Amazon have gotten really good at what we are thinking, even if we haven’t thought about it. It is not real, but man made. So, can it ever become real? No. Can it do things we may not be able to do on our own? Maybe. Ford’s cars replaced the horse and gave us the knowledge to produce machines that can do all kinds of work previously only done by hand.

AI is taking a life of its own (pun intended). It is infusing our lives in many, many areas. In education it caused a firestorm with Chat GPT. You can create websites by just giving a couple of bullet points and there you have it. Stock hackers are promoting AI technology to make millions without doing anything but investing in stocks based on the program’s recommendations. If it was that good, they wouldn’t be harking like a carnival barker. They would keep it behind doors and make their millions.

Are the robots that are here taking over our existence? We have robots to assist in modern day medical surgeries. We have Tesla making cars almost entirely with robots. We are close to having a robot that will clean our house or apartment ala Rosie of the Jetsons‚ We have automated machines that work and organize warehouses.

But the threat of it becoming Hal 900 and superseding Dave’s intelligence is there. Still science fiction, unless we let AI take over our critical thinking skills and we prefer to talk computers. Just call any large business and see what I mean. AGI is the ability of a computer to challenge a human’s capacity to do a wide range of cognitive tasks. Kinda like a graphing calculator does the math like some of us old schoolers had to do by paper and pencil. That is AGI’s intended purpose, Projects like GRT-4, a modern large language model, is the space it is attempting to venture into. Currently 72 active R&D projects across 37 countries exist. Check out Google DeepMind.

Here’s the rub. It doesn’t take current or immediate information and adjust. It has to scrape and scrape and then give advice. Can it reproduce itself into a better version? Don’t know. Can it write music like the Beatles? Don’t think so. Can it produce new images or art? Maybe.

Who will benefit from the future of AI? Well, if you want to get into copyright law or legal uses, then yes. If you want to get in on the edge in medicine, all kinds, then yes. If you enjoy coding and the inner workings of computers, then yes! Study Quantum mechanics in R&D? Go for it. Things like this is what the future is waiting on. Do we know what to do with it? We will see.

And as always, this is just one man’s opinion