alt Hacker NewsJust like every AI cycle that came before. At every cycle, we get a new tool. But we also get an extended "AI Winter" where investment dries up. This has been happening since the 1980s, we just keep redefining what "AI" is. At every cycle we move the line a bit; at one point voice recognition was firmly in the AI camp(and before that, science fiction). Now we have a machine that can do that in our pockets and nobody cares.
Does anyone remember expert systems?
Douglas Hofstadter talked about these moving goalposts for AI in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach. I remember when a program that could win at chess was considered impossibly strong AI. Then, the game go. Etc.
Heinlein in his book The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress imagined that people in the future would find it worthwhile, even necessary, to learn an artifical language LogLan so they could talk with computers. LogLan (Logical Language) would be designed to be totally unambiguous, a necessity for speaking with a computer. He didn't imagine that we'd simply throw so much compute at the problem that we'd teach computers to understand our vague, mumbled natural languages in all their diversity.