I think of AI and more like artificial stupidity. It is a giant pattern, or word frequency database that relies on volume of data to provide probabilities of word relationships to create the appearance of intelligence. But it has no conceptual understanding and cannot do more than give the appearance of understanding.
Which is perhaps the nearest it actually gets to human intelligence.
It is a tool that will reach a limit of cost savings more than anything else pretty quickly and then we'll all sit back a lament what a colossal waste of money, time and effort it was as we tried to push it into too many aspects of life. It might be good for things like checking banking transactions for fraudulent looking activities checking internet searches for possible new disease outbreaks very early. But is that really intelligence?
It isn’t going anywhere, because it already did establish its position even before the world heard about the few big generative networks.
Don’t confuse the entire branch of research and industry, with which the civilization is now intimately linked, and the two interwined happenings of recent years:
- A few specific products and their offshoots. All extremely marketed, which is why laypeople know about them.
- Making unfounded promises about such products’ imminent progress. About them turning into a concept taken from pop-culture, not the actual field.
With the ingress of opportunistists hoping for quick and easy money, it seems like yet another bubble. And I hope this bubble bursts.

But similar to ocean trade, railroads, or internet — all three of which were the subjects of legendary bubbles — the technology itself appear to not be at risk of falling into obscurity.
The final question is rhetorical, isn’t it? But, together with the mention of getting near the human intelligence, it begs to be replied. And it can’t be answered for the same reason that underpins ignosticism. Everybody believes they know what intelligence is. But when used outside of a specific field, it almost exclusively refers to a nebulous notion with no tangible meaning. Itself rooted in now antiquated ideas about human psychology: the consequence being that even if one manages to outline some discernable shape, it remains nonsensical.