Seite 1 The AI fairytale Seite 2 The U.S. got a head start Seite 3 Surveillance AI companies are moving to become defense contractors Seite 4 None of this is a reason to give up hope! Lesen Sie diesen Text auf Deutsch.
AI researcher Meredith Whittaker was awarded the Helmut Schmidt Future Prize in May. This is the minimally edited speech she held during the award ceremony in Hamburg. We are watching bulwarks of global rules-based order moan, sway and buckle as illiberal pressures mount.
And it is with this in mind that I ask your forgiveness as I proceed to deliver an urgent call in a context generally reserved for acknowledgements, thanks and optimistic visions. Make no mistake, I am optimistic. But my optimism is an invitation to analysis and action, not a ticket to complacency.
With that in mind, I want to start with some definitions to make sure we’re all reading from the same score. Because so often, in this hype-based discourse, we are not. And too rarely do we make time for the fundamental questions, the answers to which, as we shall see, fundamentally shift our perspective.
Questions like, what is AI? Where did it come from? And why is it everywhere, guaranteeing promises of omniscience, automated consciousness and what can only be described as magic? The first answer first: AI is a marketing term, not a technical one. The term "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1956 by cognitive and computer scientist John McCarthy – about a decade after the first proto-neur.