Was AI invented or discovered?

MP 125: I would argue it was discovered, and that's a helpful distinction.

There's no doubt that regardless of anyone's opinion about whether AI is useful or not, it's disrupting many industries, and will continue to do so. The distinction between invention and discovery is a gray area, but it's helpful to think about when trying to figure out where we might be headed in the near future.

The ongoing disruption

I read an account recently about a local news station that was replacing most of its production workers with an AI-based system. That station is about to lay off most of its production staff, leaving only a couple managers who will be responsible for running the AI system. The station is serving as a pilot for this kind of transition; if it "goes well", the same system will be put into place in all the stations owned by that parent company.

It seems pretty reasonable to think the parent company's definition of "well" will be based on maintaining profitability, not the quality of the service they provide. You can use AI tools to make better products more efficiently. But it's much easier to use AI tools to make worse products more cheaply, and I'm pretty sure that's the road many of these kinds of efforts will take.

This is just a tiny example of the transition that's happening in so many fields. These are not just industries that are being disrupted. These are people's lives that are being thrown upside down.

An invention or a discovery?

I would argue that the current set of AI tools in use now were discovered, rather than invented. People have been exploring different ways of processing various data sets for decades. The GPT-based approaches that led to the release of ChatGPT were being worked on for quite a while before they became generally useful. People were trying different approaches in processing massive datasets, and discovered an approach that seemed to work well. People then discovered different ways of tuning the models to make them behave in useful and less problematic ways. I keep using the word discovered here because I believe there was a lot of guesswork involved. Those guesses were almost certainly guided by informed intuition, but I think it's reasonable to say that the approaches we're now using were out there, waiting for people to find them.

So what was invented? I would argue that we've invented the machines necessary to make these discoveries. We've invented physical products like chips and boards, and manufacturing processes to produce the machines that do all this processing. Invention and discovery go hand in hand.

What difference does it make?

In some ways, it doesn't really matter if AI was invented or discovered. But I'd argue that considering it a discovery helps us understand what we can do with it moving forward, and what we can't do. One of the biggest things I try to communicate to people who are newer to thinking about this is that you can't un-discover AI. It's here to stay, not just because the companies pushing it are big and powerful, but because it's a fundamental concept that humans have discovered.

What we do with that discovery is hugely important, and is in our control.

Acceptance vs accountability

I accept that AI exists and that it will continue to be used, but I also believe we need to hold companies accountable for exploitation. AI was discovered, and that's not really an issue. The issue is how other people's work was exploited to build tools that are generally capable. An ongoing issue centers around how people's work continues to be exploited in developing, releasing, and profiting from AI tools. This is part of where I distinguish between a discovery, an invention, and a product. People are building products on top of recent discoveries and inventions, and many of those products are the real problem.

So what now?

AI, and tech in general, is going to continue to disrupt industries, professions, and lives. I think this just calls attention to the fact that tech by itself was never going to save us. It's not the tech that's disrupting anything. It's the people using that tech that are causing all this disruption.

Tech was never going to save us from ourselves. If we want to develop a just society, we have to figure that out alongside all the tech that exists now, and all that tech that will exist. We have to figure out the tech, but more importantly we have to figure out each other.