The Layperson's Guide to AI Hype

"AI" is a term you cannot escape if you follow any kind of tech news, or any news really. It's an constant drumbeat of breathless prognostications; of a future where all jobs are automated, people are obsolete, and perhaps the end of humanity as we know it while superintelligence enslaves or eradicates us. This is presented as a foregone conclusion. Companies and charlatans are getting rich by hopping on the bandwagon and embracing an "AI-first" business strategy.

The problem is, it's mostly bullshit. I'm constantly asked by people what it all means and what they can do. The truth is, this "AI" is an excellent means of prediction via probability. In the tech community, lots of people call it "fancy autocomplete". That is, given a set of input, the program can compare that input against thousands (or millions) of similar examples and spit out the most likely outcome. That's it.

I'll give an example. Inspired by Silicon Valley's "Not Hotdog" app, I recognized a need in my everyday life. We had just procured some chickens for our backyard chicken coop, which I had proudly built with my own hands. However, I had a need: to keep out predators a door to the coop should close automatically every night after the chickens roosted. Not content with simply putting the door on a timer, I feared that if one or more chickens didn't make it into the coop in time, they would be stranded outside and vulnerable to the horrors of the suburban nighttime landscape.

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