Sure, but in the context of the time, the narrative was that AI would never beat humans at chess. The assumption was you would have to encode all winning positions and that there were just too many positions possible for that to be the case.
And the narrative and assumptions were wrong. Turns out computer systems can actually not even know what the rules of chess are, learn them, and then learn to play better than any human can ever play.
Then the nay-sayers came up with a bunch of new qualifications about what “real” AI would be, because they made the wrong assumptions in the first place. The same things are happening right now in the current conversation around AI.
My point is that there has been historically substantial goal post moving around this domain, and the nay-sayers have been consistently demonstrated to be wrong. Its fun and trendy to be a naysayer. It makes you seem smarter than you are. But we’ve failed to come up with an even basic definition of ‘intelligence’ that is useful for informing debate, let alone a useful definition for what is or is not ‘artificial intelligence’.
I think we’ll have systems that are indistinguishable if not significantly better at most tasks than humans in 2-3 years. Either you wont be able to tell it wasn’t done by a human, or you’ll be able to tell simply because its so much better than what you would expect a human to be capable of. It will seem ‘super human’ in this regard. Likewise, I think we’ll solve the agency problem as well, at least when looking in from the outside. I don’t think you’ll be able to tell a difference between a machine system or a human operating behind a digital screen, whatsoever, in 2-3 years.
What is intelligence? What makes some intelligence artificial? Does that divide even really make sense? The whole concept is predicated on the assumption that there is something particularly special about whatever it is that humans possess, and when I see people moving goalposts, it strikes me that they are mostly working to protect “whatever” it is that humans have as something special or divine.
Realistically, we’re about to get passed on the track. And then, we’re going to get lapped before the naysayers have even noticed we’re not in the lead any more. Its an intentional blindspot.