The best description I've ever heard of AI is the following. I heard this in the 80s, and it has held up since:
AI is magic.
- You see a magic trick. You are amazed by the magic.
- You are shown how the trick works. You are impressed by the technique.
- You learn how to perform the trick. Now it's not magic, it's sleight-of-hand, or mirrors, or misdirection.
This is why "AI" is always bullshit: once you understand it, it's not AI any more, it's something else.
Some things that used to be AI but aren't any more:
- production systems
- expert systems
- semantic networks
- theorem provers
- Bayesian inference
- putting parentheses around data and calling it "knowledge"
- computational linguistics
- genetic algorithms
- machine translation
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
