Tech Buzzwords

An umbrella term for any computer system that makes decisions. When brought up in conversation, it is good to ask what the person actually means so you don't end up spending half an hour talking about something that nobody can define.

Possible things AI could mean:

• The automation of a task or system that isn't doing anything clever under the hood
• A hard-coded "smart" system that is just a decision tree
• A simple statistical model whose outcome is easy to interpret
• A not simple neural network that is very powerful but basically impossible to interpret

AI (“artificial intelligence”) is a general promise about the future. The future is better, inevitable, and depends on AI. "AI and the future of X" can refer to anything from conversational chatbots in healthcare to improving the elegant dexterity of robots, to planting a chip in your human brain (“interface”).

This trope is unspecific about the gains or the trade-offs for society. The push for AI gets support from governments who want in on the economic drivers in the information economy (see e.g. the 4th industrial revolution).

Often times, AI is just humans pretending to be robots.

It turns out that invisible boyfriends, food delivery robots, and other services marketed as or assumed to be AI, are actually humans doing stuff remotely. See Ghostwork for a study on all those invisible humans in the AI loop.

"One of my fav startup tricks is when they say they use AI but actually use Mechanical Turk" -- Olivia Solon

"It also killed the spark, since I became unable to have a conversation with Invisible Boyfriend that wasn’t a Turing test" -- Jess Zimmerman.