Is ‘AI’ a moving goalpost?

The late Larry Tesler, a computer scientist that worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon and Yahoo! over the course of his career defined AI as whatever hasn’t been done yet -or- the machines haven’t done yet.

In my school days, it was a machine that could beat a grandmaster in chess. Then the game AI needed to beat became Go. Early on chatbots- a program that could respond to you- was considered intelligent. Now the benchmark for “magic” has changed.

Will we agree to have achieved AI through strong AI or general purpose AI? If it covers the yet uncovered use cases for machines and surpasses our intelligence, and imagination?

Perhaps, AI is as much a marketing term as technical.

It can be an umbrella term for a wide variety of capabilities- the ability to see (computer vision), learn (machine learning), speak (speech recognition), understand (natural language capabilities). But if it stands for what machines haven’t done yet, then a machine achieving AI is impossible.

Then, it’s an ever changing goal post.

How would you define AI?

And it’s Definition of Done 😉

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