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AI and Its New Winter: from Myths to Realities

2020; Springer Nature (Netherlands); Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s13347-020-00396-6

2210-5441

Luciano Floridi,

Ethics and Social Impacts of AI

The trouble with seasonal metaphors is that they are cyclical.If you say that artificial intelligence (AI) got through a bad winter, you must also remember that winter will return, and you better be ready.An AI winter is that stage when technology, business, and the media get out of their warm and comfortable bubble, cool down, temper their sci-fi speculations and unreasonable hypes, and come to terms with what AI can or cannot really do as a technology (Floridi 2019), without exaggeration.Investments become more discerning, and journalists stop writing about AI, to chase some other fashionable topics and fuel the next fad.AI has had several winters. 1 Among the most significant, there was one in the late 1970s, and another at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s.Today, we are talking about another predictable winter (Nield 2019; Walch 2019; Schuchmann 2019). 2 AI is subject to these hype cycles because it is a hope or fear that we have entertained since we were thrown out of paradise: something that does everything for us, instead of us, better than us, with all the dreamy advantages (we shall be on holiday forever) and the nightmarish risks (we are going to be enslaved) that this entails.For some people, speculating about all this is irresistible.It is the wild west of "what if" scenarios.But I hope the reader will forgive me for a "I told you so" moment.For some time, I have been warning against commentators and "experts", who were competing to see who could tell the tallest tale (Floridi 2016).A web of myths ensued.They spoke of AI as if it were the ultimate panacea, which would solve everything and overcome everything; or as the final catastrophe, a superintelligence that would destroy millions of jobs, replacing lawyers and doctors, journalists and researchers, truckers and taxi drivers, and ending by dominating human beings as if they were pets at best.Many followed Elon Musk in declaring the development of AI the greatest existential risk run by humanity.