Emily and Alex read through Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas' recent proclamation that "artificial general intelligence is already here." Why this claim is a maze of hype and moving goalposts.

References:

Noema Magazine: "Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here." Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Peter Norvig.

"AI and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Benchmark" (Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna, et al, 2021)

"Targeting the Benchmark: On Methodology and Current Natural Language Processing Research" (David Schlangen, 2021)

"Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing" (Janet Abbate, 2017)

"The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise" (Nathan Ensenmenger, 2012)

"Is chess the drosophila of artificial intelligence? A social history of an algorithm" (Nathan Ensmenger, 2012)

"The logic of domains" (David Ribes, et al, 2019)

"Reckoning and Judgment" (Brian Cantwell Smith, 2019)

Fresh AI Hell:

Apparently modeling agencies, which rely almost entirely on independent contractors, have been using AI modeling deepfakes to meet “diversity goals” instead of just actually paying real models https://twitter.com/lukewgoldstein/status/1709660399509913816

"6 Tenets of Postplagiarism: Writing in the Age of #ArtificialIntelligence - In my 2021 book, #Plagiarism in #HigherEducation, I introduce the idea of life in the post-plagiarism era." https://twitter.com/DrSarahEaton/status/1629482563353059329

"In the future, once the robustness of our models will exceed some threshold, we will have wildly effective and dirt cheap AI therapy. Will lead to a radical improvement in people’s experience of life. One of the applications I’m most eagerly awaiting." https://x.com/ilyasut/status/1707027536150929689?s=20

"Madrid Health Service is a pioneer in applying Generative Artificial Intelligence to improve diagnosis for patients with rare diseases." https://news.microsoft.com/es-es/2023/09/15/madrid-health-service-a-pioneer-in-applying-generative-artificial-intelligence-to-improve-diagnosis-for-patients-with-rare-diseases/

"20% of researchers say they use LLMs as a scientific search engine, or for brainstorming, or literature reviews, or even to help write manuscripts." https://twitter.com/mustafasuleyman/status/1708570596333027623?s=20

"Cigna, a US health insurance provider, is being sued for the second time this year for using automated intelligence to deny medical care claims so they don't have to pay for them." https://c.im/@shansterable/111127300470975613

"BREAKING: We have partnered with @OpenAI to launch WHOOP Coach today, the most advanced generative AI feature to ever be released by a wearable." https://twitter.com/emilymbender/status/1707405301467721775?t=EVUi8sNdgw9qint7eVh60A&s=09

You can check out future streams at http://twitch.tv/dair_institute.

Follow Emily at https://twitter.com/EmilyMBender and https://dair-community.social/@EmilyMBender Follow Alex at https://twitter.com/alexhanna and https://dair-community.social/@alex

Music: Toby Menon. Production: Christie Taylor. Graphic Design: Naomi Pleasure-Park.