Are Companies Overhyping AI? (hackaday.com)

When it comes to artificial intelligence, "companies have been overselling the concept and otherwise normal people are taking the bait," writes Hackaday: Not to pick on Amazon, but all of the home assistants like Alexa and Google Now tout themselves as AI. By the most classic definition, that's true. AI techniques include matching natural language to predefined templates. That's really all these devices are doing today. Granted the neural nets that allow for great speech recognition and reproduction are impressive. But they aren't true intelligence nor are they even necessarily direct analogs of a human brain... The danger is that people are now getting spun up that the robot revolution is right around the corner...

[N]othing in the state of the art of AI today is going to wake up and decide to kill the human masters. Despite appearances, the computers are not thinking. You might argue that neural networks could become big enough to emulate a brain. Maybe, but keep in mind that the brain has about 100 billion neurons and almost 10 to the 15th power interconnections. Worse still, there isn't a clear consensus that the neural net made up of the cells in your brain is actually what is responsible for conscious thought. There's some thought that the neurons are just control systems and the real thinking happens in a biological quantum computer... Besides, it seems to me if you build an electronic brain that works like a human brain, it is going to have all the problems a human brain has (years of teaching, distraction, mental illness, and a propensity for error).
Citing the dire predictions of Elon Musk and Bill Gates, the article argues that "We are a relatively small group of people who have a disproportionate influence on what our friends, families, and co-workers think... We need to spread some sense into the conversation."

Comments

Quantum handwaving

[Kongming]

Worse still, there isn't a clear consensus that the neural net made up of the cells in your brain is actually what is responsible for conscious thought. There's some thought that the neurons are just control systems and the real thinking happens in a biological quantum computer...

Penrose, is that you?

Seriously, there is no evidence for any kind of "quantum consciousness", nor any convincing theory as to why a neural net would be insufficient to produce consciousness. I suspect that the main attraction of this idea is that it is a non-religious excuse for believing consciousness to be magical or special in some way.

This quantum business is purest hand-waving

[fyngyrz]

From TFS:

There's some thought that the neurons are just control systems and the real thinking happens in a biological quantum computer...

There is zero evidence for this. Zero. You can also say, with exactly as much evidentiary backing (none), that "there's some thought that the mind is outside the body" and "there is some thought that the mind is a program running in a computer simulation."

The evidence has thus far pointed in exactly one direction: That the mind is a product of electrical and chemical signals channeled by living cells in manners fairly conventional and guided by topology, both innate and developmental (as opposed to the quantum nature of photosynthesis, for example.)

Yes, quantum effects come into play at extremely low levels with pretty much everything; but no, they are not known to be a common modulating force from cell to cell in nature. Furthermore, the harder we look, the more normal (non-quantum) activity and complexity we find.

Finally, the more our simulations of neural activities have been advanced to model what we learn of real neural systems, the more performant they have gotten. The arrow is pointing in one pretty specific direction - and to date, it's not pointing at quantum activity as mechanism for mind even a little bit.

It's not impossible – but it's also not indicated, at all, at this point in time. It's speculation, and more to the point, it's uninformed, evidence-free speculation.