AI already has superhuman abilities in many areas, and has for decades, that’s the whole point of using it normally. We use computational intelligence in the form of optimisation algorithms for high-dimensional non-convex optimisation problems, machine learning and deep learning for complex non-linear function fitting, exact methods for SAT solving and verification tasks, etc etc. We can’t do that very well ourselves, so it’s useful to have.

Now that we have LLMs to emulate human speech and are using them as an IO wrapper for more traditional systems, it’s tempting to just call that “an AI” with superhuman abilities, but these are the just the same highly effective methods that we’ve always used (in a best case) or unreliable approximations (more likely for LLM agent stuff). None of that suggests anything like sentience or the desire to rule over humans.

I find autonomous weapon systems much scarier than the classic AI overlord scenario. No consciousness or rebellion required, just a killer drone swarm that failed to recognise its termination conditions (or was instructed to keep going)…

Right, just like Mark Rutte left politics to become a full-time secondary school teacher after his last cabinet

I am a scientist with a PhD in AI and I’m tired of hearing about it. It’s like how I imagine microbiologists would feel if their field was suddenly in the spotlight 24/7 purely because people with something to gain bombard the public with the benefits of biological weapons, which is claimed to be what microbiology is all about. All they wanted to do was learn about how the world works and maybe use that to prevent diseases or something.

The scientific field I love has been hijacked by people who don’t understand it and try to use one specific direction in the field to the detriment of the world. I can’t blame others for hating my field when all they see of it is this nonsense, I myself hate what is presented as AI just as much.

It feels unfair that we should be the ones to change, but sometimes I really wish we could rebrand the scientific field from the commercial products sharing its name. The problem is that they keep stealing our terms (like “agent”) for at best tangentially related concepts too (or present it as their specific product being what a general term means), so there’d be no end to it.

Edit: niche -> direction

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