the jig is up (13. 509)

Via Language Log, we are treated to Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal’s latest one panel comic—with mouseover title shown—that provides a funny take on the AI Effect, moving the goal-posts as artificial intelligence advances to redefine what “real” intelligence is, with a tendency to conclude that once a problem is solved, like besting a human grand master at chess, it’s all brute compute and no longer a reliable metric of what it’s gauging, and Moravec’s paradox—the observation that whilst computers can excel at maths and in a bounded game environment, they struggle with perception and mobility. Rather than siding with the scientific consensus that this counterintuitive skill-set is owing to the limits of disembodied cognition and how we take what took billions of years of experience, evolution and gravity to learn effortlessly and automatically for granted, the comic supposes that like an adolescent prodigy that is too smart for their own good, AI is making a conscious decision to avoid doing chores.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Israeli defence forces launch an aerial attack on Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities (with synchronopticæ), AI as stone soup, hip hop party fliers plus variations on the impossible trident

twelve years ago: a visit to Lucca 

thirteen years ago: US army headquarters in Europe moves to Wiesbaden plus protests in Istanbul

fourteen years ago: EU playable characters plus Germany government scandals 

sixteen years ago: a mosaic of photos of Istanbul