Verbatim
Look, putting the bloggy snark tone aside, this is just an excellent cri de couer from Scott Locklin on the sorry state of contemporary science journalism (something we’ve grumbled about here before), and how easily that leads to us, dangerously, bestowing magic on the mundane.
Machine learning and its relatives are the statistics of the future: the way we learn about the way the world works. Of course, machines aren’t actually “learning” anything. They’re just doing statistics. Very beautiful, complex, and sometimes mysterious statistics, but it’s still statistics. Nobody really knows how people learn things and infer new things from abstract or practical knowledge. When someone starts talking about “AI,” based on some machine learning technique, the Berzerker rage comes upon me. There is no such thing as “AI” as a science or a technology. Anyone who uses that phrase is a dreamer, a liar or a fool. You can tell when a nebulous buzzword like “AI” has reached peak “human information centipede;” when oligarchs start being afraid of it.
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