Arun Pandiyan

“so many people were shocked and upset when, in 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue chess-playing system defeated the world chess champion Garry Kasparov. This event so stunned Kasparov that he accused the IBM team of cheating; he assumed that for the machine to play so well, it must have received help from human experts.2 (In a nice bit of irony, during the 2006 World Chess Championship matches the tables were turned, with one player accusing the other of cheating by receiving help from a computer chess program.3) Our collective human angst over Deep Blue quickly receded. We accepted that chess could yield to brute-force machinery; playing chess well, we allowed, didn’t require general intelligence after all. This seems to be a common response when computers surpass humans on a particular task; we conclude that the task doesn’t actually require intelligence. As John McCarthy lamented, ‘As soon as it works, no one calls it AI any more.’4”
― Melanie Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

“We cannot navigate, without something to aim at and, while we are in this world, we must always navigate.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts”
― Charles Allen, Coromandel: A Personal History of South India

“Should my Modern Turing Test for the twenty-first century be met, the implications for the global economy are profound. Many of the ingredients are in place. Image generation is well advanced, and the ability to write and work with the kinds of APIs that banks and websites and manufacturers would demand is in process. That an AI can write messages or run marketing campaigns, all activities that happen within the confines of a browser, seems pretty clear. Already the most sophisticated services can do elements of this. Think of them as proto–to-do lists that do themselves, enabling the automation of a wide range of tasks. We’ll come to robots later, but the truth is that for a vast range of tasks in the world economy today all you need is access to a computer; most of global GDP is mediated in some way through screen-based interfaces amenable to an AI. The challenge is in advancing what AI developers call hierarchical planning, stitching multiple goals and subgoals and capabilities into a seamless process toward a singular end. Once this is achieved, it adds up to a highly capable AI, plugged into a business or organization and all its local history and needs, that can lobby, sell, manufacture, hire, plan—everything a company can do, only with a small team of human AI managers who oversee, double-check, implement, and co-CEO with the AI.”
― Mustafa Suleyman, The Coming Wave