AI effect
In plain wordsThe habit of deciding that once a computer can do something — play chess, recognize speech, translate — it no longer counts as real intelligence, so the label keeps moving on to tasks machines cannot manage yet.
The tendency for a capability to stop being regarded as artificial intelligence once machines perform it reliably and its workings are understood, with observers redefining intelligence to exclude it. Chess playing, optical character recognition, route planning, spam filtering, speech recognition and machine translation each passed from AI research into ordinary software in this way. The effect makes the field's achievements seem perpetually unimpressive, can skew historical judgments of its progress, and complicates debates over definitions of artificial general intelligenceartificial general intelligence, n.: AI that could learn and do almost any mental task a capable adult can, rather than excelling at one narrow job. Experts disagree on the exact bar and on when, or whether, it will arrive., since the goalposts move as systems improve. Proposed explanations include the gap between how solutions actually work (search, statistics) and folk ideas of thinking, and a reluctance to grant machines distinctively human qualities.
Nobody calls the autocorrect on their phone AI anymore — a textbook AI effect.
Origin
Pamela McCorduck described the pattern in Machines Who Think (1979), observing that each success was greeted by critics saying it was not really thinking. The same year Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach quoted the computer scientist Larry Tesler as saying 'AI is whatever hasn't been done yet', naming it Tesler's Theorem; Tesler later said he had put it as intelligence being whatever machines have not yet done. The label 'AI effect' was in use by the 2000s.
Usage note
Related to but distinct from Moravec's paradoxMoravec's paradox, n.: The observation that what is hard for people, like chess or algebra, is often easy for computers, while what toddlers do effortlessly, such as seeing, walking and picking things up, is very hard for machines., which concerns which tasks are hard for machines. The opposite tendency, calling ordinary software AI, is AI washingAI washing, n.: Falsely claiming that a product or company uses AI, or exaggerating how much it does, to look more advanced and attract customers or investors..
Related
- artificial intelligenceartificial intelligence, n.: Computer systems that do things we would normally credit to a thinking mind, such as holding a conversation, reading an X-ray or planning a route, and the field of research that builds them.
- Moravec's paradoxMoravec's paradox, n.: The observation that what is hard for people, like chess or algebra, is often easy for computers, while what toddlers do effortlessly, such as seeing, walking and picking things up, is very hard for machines.
- AI washingAI washing, n.: Falsely claiming that a product or company uses AI, or exaggerating how much it does, to look more advanced and attract customers or investors.
- artificial general intelligenceartificial general intelligence, n.: AI that could learn and do almost any mental task a capable adult can, rather than excelling at one narrow job. Experts disagree on the exact bar and on when, or whether, it will arrive.
- Deep BlueDeep Blue, prop. n.: IBM's chess computer that beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, the first time a machine defeated a reigning world champion in a match under standard tournament conditions.
- AI washingAI washing, n.: Falsely claiming that a product or company uses AI, or exaggerating how much it does, to look more advanced and attract customers or investors.
Mentioned in
artificial intelligenceartificial intelligence, n.: Computer systems that do things we would normally credit to a thinking mind, such as holding a conversation, reading an X-ray or planning a route, and the field of research that builds them., Deep BlueDeep Blue, prop. n.: IBM's chess computer that beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, the first time a machine defeated a reigning world champion in a match under standard tournament conditions., machine intelligencemachine intelligence, n.: Intelligence shown by machines; another name for artificial intelligence, preferred by some because it does not suggest that such intelligence is fake.