I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused. The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders.
And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business - not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.
I like this guy. :D
I think the only true AI we could have is something akin to an artificial brain and it's something I've looked at quite a lot because I find it fascinating which is why I reeee so hard on this topic in particular and fight people over it. I'm writing real sentience, so they establish though patterns through their own mimicry of a human brain but the brain itself would have to have neural pathways and everything.
All these computing algorithms are doing are just spitting out convincing looking results that match our own personal biases and that's not sentient thought in the slightest. When we start seeing Robobrain type stuff popping up in the market and the elites trying to preserve their brains after they die then we can all start shitting bricks.
By the way, we're already partly there thanks to Elon Musks' NeuraLink, the only puzzle left is storing brain matter over the long term and keeping it from rotting away like a human body. Also depending on how effective storing brain matter is in the future we may end up technically cracking immortality and I don't think that technology is far off.