The Racist Myth at The Core of The AI Hype
It is almost impossible to avoid AI hyped claims whenever you go online or try to watch the news. This forces one, whether you want to or not, to engage with such claims. However, the more I tried to contemplate the wild assertions and predictions of the AI spokespeople, the more I began to recognize a fundamental fallacy, or rather a myth, at the core of the hyped claims. This foundational myth is what the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould describes as the error of reification , i.e. the propensity to convert an abstract concept like intelligence , which is complex and multifaceted set of human capabilities, into a single hard entity that is defined and quantifiable 1 . This is so apparent in the term Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which is at the core of all the AI promises and prophecies. The term “general intelligence” traces its roots to Charles Spearman, who in the early 20 th century applied the statistical method of factor analysis to certain test scores and ...