Thomas Haigh (44:21)
All right, so the context for this is the technologies that we now call AI are fundamentally around neural networks, mostly around generative AI, within that, mostly around large language models. And those technologies as they were being developed in the early 2000s, were not called AI because they'd been pushed out of the AI field. And I think also to an extent, because they didn't want the baggage always that came with the AI brand. Those things were called machine learning, deep learning, pattern recognition. And something really dramatic has happened in the last 10, 12 years that essentially the people who'd been taking this other technological approach that existed outside AI as a brand and existed outside the elite AI labs basically stormed the castle, raised their flag and said, we're AI. Now when you say AI, this is what you mean, not the symbolic AI. A question is why did the machine learning community sees the AI brand for itself after having kept a distance from it for many years? I think the argument of that is fundamentally around the science fiction narrative associations of AI. They reclaimed the brand. I've got a quote in the book from an AI researcher who says the exact day on which he became an AI researcher and not a machine learning researcher was when they went to the NIPS conference for the neural net stuff. And Mark Zuckerberg was there in the presidential suite having recently hired Yann Lecun and was offering people lots of money to come to his group at Facebook which was called AI. And then obviously the DeepMind people, I mean, Shane Legg really heavily promoted the concept of AGI and OpenAI DeepMind. Those other guys really had a revival of this early AI sense that this was something that was going to produce human and then superhuman intelligence with the whole singularity thing in the near future. And that is also why so many trillions of dollars have been flowing into it. So I think they switched the name of the thing from the more technical wonkish machine learning to the attention grabbing AI very specifically because they wanted to make a number of claims that seem plausible to us because we've been conditioned by science fiction. So one of those is that AI is going to be this superhuman general purpose thing. Another one is that it's something that is going to happen really quickly. So if you look at science fiction stories like say Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress or the Terminator stories, AI just happens, right? One day a computer gets big enough and it suddenly becomes self aware. And that obviously happens because the authors had no idea how you could make a self aware computer. So they're just, well, whatever, it just happened, okay, deal with it. So we're also primed to believe that AI is something that can just happen very quickly and unexpectedly without actually needing much work. Once you've got A big enough tech platform. And also, of course, in most stories where AI exists, it's the most important thing in the world. And you get the whole doomer versus accelerationist thing because in some AI stories it's basically a metaphor for slavery. And of course the robots exist purely in order to be oppressed and rebel. And in other stories it's basically the Pinocchio story of the boy that wants to become real, et cetera. But I think it's exactly the science fiction promises that are implicit in the brand of AI which began in science, but during the AI winter, really survived much more strongly in science fiction than it did in computer science that led to them reappropriating the brand. So back to the prediction that I made. It seems that there is pretty much no margin for error in the promises that have been made for AI. Every leader of every major AI company has got a personal timeline for achieving AGI and the promise that the singularity is going to happen sometime soon after that and we're all going to techno heaven or techno hell. But either way, the rapture is coming. There's not much margin for error in that. And it seems to be much more like that. AI is going to be like other technologies. It's kind of going to be. It's producing tangible tools that do some things really well. And I don't think those tools are going away. But the question is, is bundling together all these different technologies like image recognition and text generation and autonomous vehicles into this one thing called AI and making these future premises for it going to work. And I think if the overall superhuman intelligence thing doesn't pan out, or even if the technology works, but the business bubble bursts because historically, even with something like the Internet, as you're aware, the Internet wasn't a flash in the pan thing. The Internet was really important, but the dot com stock bubble still burst. So even in a scenario like that, I think the brand will become tainted again like it did in the AI winter of the 90s. And, and in the 90s, for example, if the 90s is the period where continuous speech recognition really becomes an important thing. So you've got technologies like Dragon, naturally speaking, and they don't call those things AI, they call them speech recognition, because AI is out of fashion, but speech recognition is in. And very recently, actually the company that bought the company that bought the company, the bought Dragon, was bought by Microsoft. It was nuanced and it was rebranded back to being AI as Microsoft's big play in AI for healthcare. But speech recognition spent like 30 years not being AI. So I think we may get something similar that people come up with these much more specific brands for the technologies that actually work. But the benefits of being associated with this big science fiction narrative around AI phase, when people are like, oh, it's been three years. Where's the stuff you promised us would be three years away? The stock market bubble bursts. Nvidia is no longer the world's biggest company, et cetera, et cetera. And people try and distance themselves from that and go back to the idea of having much more specific brands associated with the techs that work brand wise. I like to say it works a bit like a fashion brand, like Chanel. Right. So, you know, Chanel makes really good fragrance and they have good lipsticks, they have the Runway stuff, and then they brand extend into handbags and watches and so on. And it's not like the things that are good about the Chanel Watch are the same things that are good about the number five fragrance. But the brand, like, unites these disparate things and gives you this sense that they all are sharing qualities with each other in some more intangible kind of way.
